The Europe beyond Europe
Outer Borders, Inner Limits
Berlin (2007)
Page 37 - 62


Regine Dehnel

Perpetrators, victims, and art
The National Socialists' campaign of pillage

In Berlin, two major exhibits marked the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War and recalled the postwar era. They reminded us of Germany's, and Europe's, predicament at the war's end: 55 million people dead, including 25 million civilians; countless cities more than half destroyed; and an all-pervasive hunger.

Both exhibits started with pictures and information about National Socialism and campaigns of persecution and murder. One series of images illustrated the "legalized" looting of Jewish property by the Nazi state.[1] An issue of Newsletter for the German Population, from 9 May 1945, mentioned one of the biggest private Nazi art thieves, former General Governor Dr Hans Frank. Quoting a TASS news report of 6 May 1945, it was reported: "In Mr. Frank's house, paintings and other art objects worth a total of 12.5 million pounds sterling were found; he had stolen these from Warsaw."[2] The documents on display touched upon one of the most far-reaching aspects of Nazi policies: the unscrupulous misappropriation of cultural assets, first in Germany, then in all of Europe. Given the aforementioned numbers of human victims, the looting of cultural artefacts has not been very prominent in the public debate about National Socialism. Nonetheless, Nazi art theft has become increasingly central to research in contemporary history, and especially the history of libraries, art, and archives.
The state of research
Since the Allies were the first who tried to undo the consequences of Nazi looting, the first publications on the topic appeared in the English-speaking world. They were concerned with finding as many stolen works as possible, reuniting collections, and returning them to their rightful owners.[3] In the two Germanys, the issue was not considered relevant during the first years of their existence. The first German study came out two decades after the end of the war; remarkably, it was published simultaneously by Henschelverlag in East Berlin and by Ackermann in Munich. No less interesting, it documented the losses of German museums on both sides of the inner-German border.[4] Thus, German museums were primarily interested in registering their own losses.

As early as 1963, however, Ruth and Max Seydewitz had published their book Die Dame mit dem Hermelin (The Lady with the Ermine), also at Henschelverlag.[5] In the ideological context of the German Democratic Republic's officially proclaimed antifascism, which hardly acknowledged any East German responsibility for events prior to 1945, this work of popular history, lacking precise references to sources, offered an overview of the Nazis' theft of art, illustrated its pan-European extent, and dwelled upon the role of certain individuals, from Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Reichsleiter Alfred Rosenberg to the Ancestral Heritage Research and Teaching Society (Forschungs- und Lehrgemeinschaft "Das Ahnenerbe"). In 1972, Ruth and Max Seydewitz published another book on the same topic.[6] Both works were widely translated in other socialist countries.[7]

In the countries affected by Nazi looting, the memory of the losses remained vivid. But although the debate on the topic was intense, it was overshadowed by the ideological evolution of the Cold War. Shortly after the war, Polish art historians and librarians had begun to record the cultural assets the Germans had "secured", i.e. seized and transported to Germany[8]. Books published in the postwar period documented Polish intellectuals' struggle to have Poland's cultural treasures returned.[9] But for several decades, starting in the 1950s, the lack of diplomatic relations between the Federal Republic of Germany and Poland, on the one hand, and the officially declared fraternity between Poland and the GDR, on the other hand, made it impossible to look for Polish cultural objects on German territory.[10] Things changed after the political upheaval in eastern Europe and the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s: Updated catalogues of lost objects were published, and new initiatives were launched to search for them.[11]

In the Federal Republic, meanwhile, librarians, art historians, and archivists started debating their own professions' responsibility for the looting of cultural assets. The debate began cautiously in the 1970s and gathered momentum in the 1980s. In the 1970s, an important contribution was made to exploring public librarians' acquiescence and participation in "cleansing" libraries from undesirable literature;[12] in the 1980s, several authors studied German libraries' involvement in "expropriating" Jewish private collections.[13]

This line of inquiry reached a climax in 1988, when the Wolfenbüttel Study Group in Library History (Wolfenbütteler Arbeitskreis für Bibliotheksgeschichte) devoted its fifth annual conference to the history of libraries under National Socialism and followed up with another conference on the same topic in 1989. Attention focused on the politics of librarianship both in and outside Germany[14], indicating the shift of interest from domestic policies to the looting of cultural objects in the occupied territories.

Art and archival historians in the Federal Republic took longer to face up to their own professions' involvement in Nazi lootings, not least because of art history's professional focus on protecting and preserving already acquired works of art and its specialization in centuries past. In 1995, the art history journal kritische berichte published a thematic issue on looted art, which included archaeology and ethnology and inserted Nazi art theft into a larger context of "capturing" museum objects.[15] In 2005, art historians' research on the history of their own discipline was documented in a traveling exhibit and an accompanying publication.[16] In the same year, the Congress of German Archives (Deutscher Archivtag) was organized around the theme of "German Archivists and National Socialism."

English-speaking authors had already published several fundamental works on looted art by the mid-1990s.[17] Around 2000, provenance research, i.e. research into the exact origin of works of art, became more popular in Germany as well, concentrating on 1933-45 and especially on the fate of Jewish collectors.[18]

This line of inquiry was decisively influenced by the Washington Conference Principles. The Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets, organized by the US Department of State and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and attended by 44 government delegations and 13 non-governmental organizations, met from 30 November to 3 December 1998.[19] The principles adopted by conference participants called upon the international community of curators and art historians to identify works of art seized by the Nazis, publicize information about them, and "achieve a just and fair solution". Since the adoption of the Washington Conference Principles, initiatives have been launched in many European and American countries – including Austria, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States – to identify stolen works of art and find their owners. Information about these works is published on the Internet.[20] National and international conferences have facilitated exchanges between scholars from different countries,[21] and conference proceedings are published to make their findings widely available.[22] Historical exhibits have been devoted to looted art.[23] In December 1999, responding to the Washington Conference Principles' injunction to "develop national processes to implement these principles", the German cabinet, state governments, and municipal administrations adopted a joint statement.[24]

The past six years have shown that inter-disciplinary and international cooperation is indispensable. It has also become evident that research is focusing on two areas. On the one hand, there are now a large number of historical studies on the Nazi looting of cultural objects, examining the structure, agents, and targets of art theft from the point of view of its victims. This has given rise to very specific research guides aiming to help find stolen objects still kept in public collections.[25] On the other hand, the professions concerned have engaged in soul-searching; for historical reasons, this has mainly taken place in Germany, but also, increasingly, in Austria.

Given its history, Germany is facing an especially steep challenge to investigate the persecutions perpetrated both in the occupied countries and domestically. This has spawned an extensive literature on "Aryanization" policies in Germany, showing that the looting of cultural assets was flanked by a huge machinery of fiscal and emigration authorities, preservationists, and museum and library directors, who ensured a "smooth" utilization of cultural assets that had been "secured" and "Aryanized," i.e. confiscated, extorted, and looted. This is one of the aspects I am bracketing out in the following rough chronology of the main looting campaigns and in my account of their principal thrusts, agents, and victims. Nor shall I discuss the library and museum administrations set up in the conquered territories as part of the civil administration, even though they often contributed to the destruction, scattering, and loss of collections through their "cleansing" and "restructuring" activities.[26] In what follows I shall concentrate on organized, ideologically motivated looting.
Nazi theft of cultural assets: The Reich, Austria, and the Czech Republic
The first victims of the Nazis' looting policies were their own citizens. A series of emergency decrees issued between February and July 1933[27] declared communists, social democrats, union officials – in short: all dissenters – to be public enemies. Their property could be confiscated in the interests of the National Socialist state.

Shortly after Hitler took power, the process of "forced coordination" (Gleichschaltung) included measures allowing for parties and trade unions to be stripped of their assets, including their book, archival, and art collections. Confiscated trade union libraries were turned over to the party archive of the NSDAP and to the German Labour Front, and later to the NSDAP's Main State Archive in Munich.[28] Books belonging to the Social Democratic Party ended up in the library of the Office of the Secret State Police (Geheime Staatspolizeiamt, or Gestapo).[29]

Freemasons suffered the same treatment. After a first wave of arbitrary attacks, all lodges and grand lodges were dissolved by the summer of 1935. Their assets were confiscated and either sold or collected in so-called lodge museums. Library collections were concentrated in Berlin. By May 1936, there were already 500 000-600 000 volumes of Freemason literature at the main office of the SS Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD) in Berlin.[30]

In 1937, the Nazis began increasingly persecuting the churches. In December, they closed down the Apologetic Central Office of the German Protestant Church, the Confessional Church's information and publication office in Berlin's Spandau district. In January 1938, the Episcopal head office of Catholic Action was shut down in Düsseldorf. Together with libraries confiscated in Austria, the collections of both institutions were to be united in a "large Central Library for Research on the Church Question."[31]

The primary target of the Nazi persecutions and looting, however, was the Jewish population. The Jews were gradually disenfranchised: by the Law on the Restoration of Professional Civil Service of 7 April 1933; new severe restrictions added to a tax imposed for fleeing the Reich in May 1934; and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour of 14 September 1935. From April 1938, Jews were obliged to declare their assets; and the "Jewish property tax", introduced in November 1938, ruined countless Jewish families, forcing them to part with both simple family possessions and valuable collections.

The Eleventh Decree Supplementing the Reich Citizenship Law of October 1941, which made legal emigration impossible for Jews, and the "final solution of the Jewish question" adopted in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference triggered a machinery which, in the course of the deportation and annihilation of the Jews, "utilized" their few remaining possessions to the last piece. Even German Jews living abroad, who had managed to save their lives by fleeing or emigrating, were affected by this process, since the Eleventh Decree deprived them of German citizenship. Their possessions, including libraries and collections left behind, were declared to be the property of the German Reich.

Noted collectors, such as Max Silberberg (d.1943 in Theresienstadt), Victor Klemperer Edler von Klemenau (d.1943 in Rhodesia), and Dr Henri Hinrichsen (d.1942 in Auschwitz), fell victim to these mechanisms of discrimination, exclusion, and "liquidation". All in all, 170 000 German Jews lost not only all their possessions, but their lives.

After the annexation of Austria in March 1938, the incorporation of the Czech (Sudeten German) territories adjacent Germany, and the occupation of Bohemia and Moravia in 1939, the measures of persecution were extended to the Jewish population of these territories.

Austria, in particular, became a testing ground for Nazi looting policies. A "book utilization office" specially created in Vienna collected and sorted hundreds of thousands of books belonging to Austrian Jews. Some were discarded, others were dispatched to the "Old Reich" and incorporated into German libraries.[32] A ruthless manhunt for Austrian Jewish art collectors was on.[33]

Looting in the "Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia" was less drastic, partly because after the Munich Agreement, few in the Czech Republic had illusions about Hitler's intentions. Many potential victims fled in good time. Otherwise, there were comparatively few changes to the structure of libraries, museums, and academic institutions, and the amount of looting was therefore limited.[34] Just as in Germany and Austria, however, Jewish culture suffered devastating persecution.[35]
Actors and Organizations
In Germany, the confiscations were at first organized by the Gestapo, which had been created out of Prussia's Political Police on 26 April 1933. Its task was to investigate and fight all "endeavours endangering the state". The SD had similar ideological aims: led by Reinhard Heydrich, it acted as the NSDAP's own intelligence and counter-intelligence agency. From 1936, the SD stepped up its activities and began analyzing the looted materials, not least to make "the Gestapo accept a degree of spiritual leadership by the SD."[36] Both Gestapo and SD were establishing a Central Library for the Study of the Opposition, with four sections: Generalia, Freemasons, churches, and Jews.[37]

On 27 September 1939, the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or RSHA) came into being. It combined two state agencies, the Gestapo and the Reich Criminal Police Office (Reichskriminalpolizeiamt), with the party agency of the SD. Created by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler and placed under his command, it became the main instrument of Nazi terror: From mid-1941, it was charged with the annihilation of the Jews. At the same time, it organized the looting of cultural assets in Germany and the annexed territories. In particular, this concerned libraries and archives, and, in Austria, works of art as well. In January 1939, Himmler reported to the Reich Chancellery that his agency had confiscated artistic objects worth 60-70 million Reichsmark.[38]

In June 1938, Hitler had formulated the "Führer's proviso", which gave him the first call on stolen works of art, at first in Austria and the Czech Republic, and later in all of Europe. As of 21 June 1939, he named Dr Hans Posse, the director of the Dresden Art Gallery, his special envoy charged with collecting works for the "Führer's museum" he planned to build in Linz. The "Führer's proviso" was implemented under the supervision of Reich Minister Hans Heinrich Lammers, chief of staff of the Reich Chancellery, and Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, chief of staff of the party chancellery from May 1941 and Hitler's secretary from 1943.

After the annexation of Austria, two more art thieves made their mark: Arthur Seyss-Inquart, governor (Reichsstatthalter) of Ostmark, as Austria was called after annexation, and Dr. Kajetan Mühlmann, serving, among other positions, as head of the Art and Museum Department in the Ministry of Domestic and Cultural Affairs. As representatives of the German-appointed civil administration, they acted in the interests of the German Reich.
Looting in Europe during the Second World War
Although Poland was the first country to fall victim to the Second World War, I shall first focus on looting in western Europe, since it is here that one of the most powerful organizations for looting cultural assets came into being, Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), Rosenberg's own mobile task force.

Since January 1934, Rosenberg had been the Führer's representative in charge of supervising the NSDAP's entire system of political instruction and education. On 29 January 1940, he was given permission to prepare the establishment of a "Higher School" that was to become the central National Socialist university. The Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question was created in March 1941 in Frankfurt am Main as one of the future university's first departments. After the invasion of France, Rosenberg persuaded Hitler that a special organization should be put in charge of transporting "unclaimed Jewish property" and "cultural assets appearing to be valuable" to Germany. The ERR was created on 17 July 1940. The Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question was one of the main beneficiaries of the lootings carried out by the ERR. Staffed with over 100 specialists who had already served under Rosenberg before, the ERR looted over 50 Masonic lodges in France as well as the libraries of the Séminaire Israélite de France (founded in 1830) and the largest French Jewish book collection, that of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, shipping off the spoils to Frankfurt. The ERR's looting lists for Paris mention the libraries of the Rothschild family as well as the Biblioteka Polska, founded in 1839 and managed since 1890 by Cracow's Academy of Sciences, and the Turgenev Library, the biggest Russian émigré library in Paris, with over 60 000 volumes.

The Special Staff for Music (Sonderstab Musik) confiscated valuable music libraries and collections of instruments belonging to Jewish musicians, music historians, publishers, and collectors, including the composer Darius Milhaud, the pianist Arthur Rubinstein, and the pianist and harpist Wanda Landowska.[39] In France, the ERR also confiscated major Jewish art collections, including those of Alphonse Kann and David David-Weill. Cynically, the ERR installed its French headquarters in the library building of the Alliance Israélite Universelle on rue La Bruyère, which had opened in 1937. A look at the ERR's organizational structure may serve to illustrate the scope of Rosenberg's ambitions. There were special staffs for the Fine Arts, churches, the east (focusing on eastern European émigrés), the Higher School's Central Library (with a focus on Jewish libraries), prehistory, racial policy, and music.

Western Europe was also where Special Commando Künsberg, named after Eberhard Freiherr von Künsberg, made its debut. A Secret Field Police Group subordinated to the Foreign Ministry, it was given marching orders for the Netherlands and Belgium on 15 May 1940, by Ribbentrop. Künsberg was charged with "securing" strategically important materials for the Foreign Ministry. With the help of the German ambassador in Paris, Otto Abetz, he was actively involved in confiscating works of art that belonged to Jews. By August 1940, Künsberg's units had collected 1500 paintings.[40]

While in France, the activities of the ERR led to conflicts with the territorial Wehrmacht commander in France and his Art Protection Force (Kunstschutz). In Belgium, the Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei, or Sipo, as the Gestapo and Criminal Police were collectively called) and the SD worked hand in hand with the ERR. The Sipo and the SD carried out the confiscations, targeting the usual enemies (Freemasons, Jewish and socialist organizations), while the ERR was in charge of sorting and dispatching the looted objects.

The situation in the Netherlands was special, since Germany aimed to integrate the country into the Reich. There were fewer seizures and shipments of public collections. However, "enemy" libraries and archives were confiscated. These included the collections of the International Institute of Social History and the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, the Ets Haim/Livraria Montezinos and the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana (two of the greatest Dutch Jewish libraries), and the Masonic lodge of the Grand Orient of the Netherlands in Den Haag. Seyss-Inquart was named Reich commissar for the occupied Netherlands on 24 May 1940. His civil administration, Mühlmann's office (also under Seyss-Inquart's jurisdiction), and the Enemy Property Administration (Feindvermögensverwaltung) carried out confiscations of "enemy" art collections. These included the collection of Fritz Lugt, who had left the Netherlands in 1939, and that of the Jewish collector Alphonse Jaffé.

After the occupation of Yugoslavia and Greece, special ERR units operated there as well. Italy, Germany's ally, was spared looting for some time, as was Hungary. In September 1943, however, the ERR did loot the Biblioteca della Comunità Israelitica and the Biblioteca del Collegio Rabbinico Italiano, two centuries-old Jewish libraries.[41] And by March 1944, the ERR was sending works of art belonging to Hungarian artistocrats and Jews to Germany.[42]
Central and eastern Europe
The invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 started a predatory war of annihilation against the "racially inferior" peoples of eastern Europe, which left six million people dead in Poland and over twenty million in the Soviet Union, including three million and one million Jews, respectively. A statement by Hitler will suffice to illustrate the Nazis' attitude toward these peoples:

Poles may have only one master – the Germans. Two masters cannot exist side by side, and this is why all members of the Polish intelligentsia must be killed. It sounds cruel, but such is the law of life.[43]
In Poland, too, the looting of cultural artefacts started immediately after the invasion. The situation was special here, since Poland was completely stripped of its statehood and partitioned. One part was annexed to the German Reich, becoming the districts of Warthegau and Danzig-Westpreussen. The central part of Poland was named General Government on 26 October 1939, and was made up of four districts: Cracow, Lublin, Radom, and Warsaw. After the invasion of the Soviet Union, Galicia, i.e. eastern Galicia, was added as a fifth district. Already on 12 October 1939, Hitler had appointed Hans Frank as governor-general. Different rules were applied on the different territories. In the annexed regions, Hermann Göring, prime minister of Prussia, aviation minister, and Hitler's deputy, was given full authority over all economic questions as plenipotentiary for the four-year plan. His special representative for gathering and "securing" artistic and cultural treasures was Kajetan Mühlmann, who had already participated in the looting of Jewish-owned art collections in Vienna and in the Netherlands. On 19 October 1939, Mühlmann founded the Main Trusteeship Office for the East (Haupttreuhandstelle Ost, HTO) in Berlin for locating, administering, and appraising Polish public and private property. A decree entitled "Protective Measures for Monuments of Cultural History in Poland" had been issued earlier, on 10 October 1939. On December 1, an Office of the Trustee-General for Securing German Cultural Assets in the Annexed Eastern Territories was created as part of the HTO. It was directed by Professor Heinrich Harmjanz, head of the Ethnology Department of the Ancestral Heritage Research and Teaching Society (for more on which see below). Branches of the Trustee-General's Office were created in Katowice, Lódz, Poznan, and Gdansk. One after another, its staff looted museums, churches, and manors in the annexed territories. By May 1941, according to its own accounts, the Trustee-General's Office for the East had "secured" 102 libraries, 15 castles, and 21 collections as well as 1100 individual paintings and watercolours and several hundred engravings.[44] They also opened a "book collection point" in Poznan's St Michael's Church for confiscated public and private book collections.

A "Decree on the Confiscation of the Property of the Former Polish State inside the General Government" was issued on 15 November 1939, and a "Decree on the Confiscation of Art Objects in the General Government" on December 16.

Kajetan Mühlmann, a servant of two masters as it were, managed the confiscated collections in the General Government, including those of the National Museum, the Czartoryski Museum, Cracow University's Art History Institute, Cracow Cathedral, Warsaw's Royal Castle, the library of Warsaw University, the treasures of Sandomierz Cathedral, and the Museum of the Diocese of Tarnów.

In addition to Göring's Main Trusteeship Office for the East as well as Frank and Mühlmann, Himmler's RSHA was also active in Poland. An RSHA memorandum dated 8 October 1939, stated:

The Einsatzkommandos are asked to ascertain which Jewish, Catholic, Marxist, and possibly Masonic libraries are located within their area of operations.[45]
In Poland, the RSHA pursued its usual aims. In order to "study the enemy", it "secured" numerous libraries and transported them to the RSHA headquarters in Berlin, including parts of the political section of Cracow's Law Department, the libraries of the Ukrainian Institute and the Polish Parliament, the Judaica Library at Warsaw's Great Synagogue, the collections of the French, Danish, and Hungarian Institutes, and the remainders of the collection of the Warsaw-based Institute for Cooperation with Foreign Countries.[46] Ancesteral Heritage was particularly active in Poland. Founded as a Society for the Study of Ancient Intellectual History – with Heinrich Himmler as one of the co-founders – Ancesteral Heritage was looking for proof that the Polish territories had first been settled by Germanic peoples, in order to corroborate the superiority of the Germanic race and underpin Germany's "natural" claim to the Polish lands. With this aim in mind, it confiscated collections and holdings pertaining to ancient history.[47]

Harmjanz and his deputy at the Trustee-General's Office for the East, Wolfram Sievers, were also, respectively, department head and executive manager of Ancesteral Heritage. Coupled with their membership in the SS and their close ties to the RSHA, this provided a firm basis for their looting activities. Eventually, they "transferred" the collections of the Warsaw Archaeological Museum to Poznan. Valuable pieces, such as the Boroczyce gold medal from Warsaw's National Museum (still missing), were transported to the RSHA headquarters in Berlin.[48]

The intentional destruction of cultural artefacts in Poland deserves a separate discussion.

While at least some of the Polish collections confiscated by the Main Trusteeship Office for the East or looted by the General Government administration and shipped off by the RSHA and Ancesteral Heritage were returned to Poland after the war via the Allied collecting points, many libraries and archives suffered a different fate. Of the 251 Jewish libraries that existed in Poland in 1939, which together held more than 1 650 000 books, and the 748 public libraries with a total of 860 806 volumes, 70 percent were lost by war's end.[49] The invasion of the Soviet Union gave the Nazis a much larger area to loot on. Five months after the invasion, the Wehrmacht had occupied a territory inhabited by around 40 percent of the Soviet population. The Reich Commissariat Ostland (Reichskommissariat Ostland), which included Tallin, Riga, Vilnius, and Minsk, and the Reich Commissariat Ukraine, with Kiev, Dnipropetrovsk, and Kherson, were established as civil administrations. The other occupied territories, near Leningrad, Moscow, and Kharkov, were ruled by the military administrations of Army Groups North, Centre, and South.

As a consequence, the Wehrmacht's organizations were now directly in charge of confiscating and shipping off cultural artefacts. The directors of the Army archives, Army libraries, and Army museums supervised the confiscation of archives and libraries, in particular. The most popular cargo, the legendary Amber Room from the Catherine Palace in Tsarskoe Selo near Leningrad, was sent to Königsberg.

The Special Commando Künsberg was active in the immediate vicinity of the front and Army Groups North, Centre, and South. It was searching for strategically important materials, such as papers of the foreign ministries, embassies, and delegations, on behalf of the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories as well as the Foreign Ministry's Geographic Service and Information and Broadcasting Department. By late 1942, as the Wehrmacht's advance came to a standstill, stopping the expansion of occupied territories, the special commando was disbanded. Unsurprisingly, some of its staff members were transferred to the RSHA.

The ERR continued its looting activities in the Soviet Union. Rosenberg, whom Hitler named Minister for the Occupied Territories, created working groups for Ostland, Ukraine, and White Ruthenia. His staff began to weed out "Bolshevik" literature, collect archival materials needed for "genealogical" research, and making inventories of the collections with a view to concentrating them in a national library, a national archive, and a national museum in Kiev.

Eventually the ERR went about establishing a "Library of the East" (Ostbücherei). This included the émigré library collections confiscated earlier in France and the books of Minsk's Lenin Library. By 1 December 1944, the Library of the East in Ratibor had catalogued over 100 000 books, with approximately two million more waiting to be classified.[50]
Conclusion
A comparative analysis of the looting campaigns targeting specific groups of the population between 1933 and 1945, first in Germany, then in other European countries, reveals more similarities than differences. There was institutional continuity. The RSHA confiscated "enemy materials" first in Germany itself, then in the occupied territories. The ERR was active in both western and eastern Europe, and the same goes for the Special Commando Künsberg and Ancesteral Heritage. The same people were involved in these activities across the occupied countries, as illustrated by the cases of Seyss-Inquart, Mühlmann, and Künsberg. In all cases, the Jewish population was mercilessly persecuted and robbed.

But there were also differences. Whereas in France, the Army and its Art Protection Service tended to oppose the actions of the ERR and prevent it from shipping off cultural artefacts, no such agency existed during the Russian campaign. On 30 September 1942, Hitler issued a decree that put the ERR in charge of cultural artefacts in territories under both civil and military administration. At the same time, the military became increasingly involved in confiscations.[51]

While public collections in western Europe were mostly left untouched, no such rule applied in eastern Europe. Whereas the Brussels-based Trusteeship Office focused on estimating and liquidating "enemy property", meaning the possessions of Jews and individual political opponents[52], in Poland the Main Trusteeship Office for the East and the general governor had access to all public assets. Paragraph 1 of the new Decree on the Confiscation of Property of the Former Polish State inside the General Government stipulated that

[a]ll publicly owned works of art in the General Government are to be confiscated to serve the execution of tasks carried out in the general interest, in case they are not already covered by the Decree on the Confiscation of the Property of the Former Polish State of 15 November 1939.[53]
In the Soviet Union, looting almost exclusively concerned publicly owned cultural assets, not least because most of the formerly private or church-owned collections had been nationalized after the October Revolution.[54] In addition, the definition of publicly owned works of art used in paragraph 2 of the above-quoted decree also included church- and privately-owned art collections. Paragraph 3 made it mandatory to declare any such works. While in the "Old Reich" and in western Europe, Jews were the main target of all persecutions, in eastern Europe the entire population was affected. This is why after the war many Polish individuals were looking for cultural artefacts that had been stolen from them.[55]

Other differences have been highlighted in several studies: the increasing volume of materials confiscated by the RSHA and the Special Commando Künsberg, the ERR's shift from the fine and applied arts to prehistoric objects, and the lack of interest in eastern Europe found among major "individual" art thieves.[56]

Nevertheless, future studies should perhaps focus less on the specifics of each case and more on the numerous continuities in Nazi looting. Such an approach is more likely to help heal the wounds that still remain open, especially in Russia.



* [1] Burkhard Asmuss (ed.), 1945. Der Krieg und seine Folgen. Kriegsende und Erinnerungspolitik in Deutschland, (Berlin 2005). The exhibition for which this catalogue was produced was held 28 April 2005 to 23 October 2005 at the German Historical Museum in Berlin.
* [2] Maren Eichhorn (ed.), Die Stunde Null. Überleben 1945 (Berlin 2005). The exhibition for which this catalogue was produced was held 8 May 2005 to 16 April 2005 at the Museum of European Cultures in Berlin.
* [3] This includes reports by Allied MFA&A (Museums, Fine Arts, and Archives) officers published in the College Art Journal 1945-1947 as well as publications such as T. S. Howe, Salt Mines and Castles. The Discovery and Restitution of European Art (New York 1946) and Leslie E. Poste, "Books Go Home From the War", in Library Journal, 73, 1948, 1699-1704.
* [4] Marianne Bernhard, Verlorene Werke der Malerei. In Deutschland in der Zeit von 1939 bis 1945 zerstörte und verschollene Gemälde aus Museen und Galerien (Berlin, München 1965).
* [5] Ruth and Max Seydewitz, Die Dame mit dem Hermelin (Berlin 1963).
* [6] Ruth and Max Seydewitz, Das Mädchen mit der Perle (Berlin 1972).
* [7] By 1979, Die Dame mit dem Hermelin had been translated into Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Estonian, and Romanian. Das Mädchen mit der Perle was published inter alia in Warsaw in 1986. In the GDR, the book went through four editions until 1985.
* [8] Karol Estreicher (ed.), Cultural Losses of Poland. Index of Polish Cultural Losses during the German Occupation, 1939-1944 (London 1944).
* [9] Stanislaw Lorentz (ed.), Walka o dobra kultury. Warszawa 1939-1945. 2 vols. (Warsaw 1970).
* [10] Uwe Hartmann, "Geschenke vom Brudervolk? Anmerkungen zur Rückführung von kriegsbedingt verlagerten Kulturgütern zwischen der DDR und der Volksrepublik Polen", in Andrea Langer (ed.), Der Umgang mit dem kulturellen Erbe in Deutschland und Polen im 20. Jahrhundert (Warsaw 2004), 335-351; Andrzej Mezynski, Biblioteki naukowe w Generalnym Gubernatorstwie w latach 1939-1945. Wybór dokumentów zródlowych (Warsaw 2003), XXIII.
* [11] The catalogues of lost art are available both in print and on-line at: www.polandembassy.org/.
* [12] Friedrich Andrae, Volksbüchereien und Nationalsozialismus. Materialien zur Theorie und Politik des öffentlichen Bibliothekswesens 1933-1945 (Wiesbaden 1970).
* [13] Ingo Toussaint, Die Universitätsbibliothek Freiburg im Dritten Reich (Freiburg 1982; second, revised edition: München 1984); Hans-Gerd Happel, Das wissenschaftliche Bibliothekswesen im Nationalsozialismus. Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Universitätsbibliotheken (München, London, New York, Paris 1989). On the various ways libraries have dealt with their history, see Jürgen Babendreier, "Kollektives Schweigen? Die Aufarbeitung der NS-Geschichte im deutschen Bibliothekswesen", and Peter Vodosek, "'Reflex der Verdrängung'? Zur Rezeptionsgeschichte eines schwierigen Themas", in Sven Kuttner, Bernd Reifenberg (eds.), Das bibliothekarische Gedächtnis. Aspekte der Erinnerungskultur an braune Zeiten im deutschen Bibliothekswesen (Marburg 2004), pp. 10-22 and 23-53, respectively.
* [14] Peter Vodosek, Manfred Komorowski (eds.): Bibliotheken während des Nationalsozialismus. 2 vols. (Wiesbaden 1989-1992).
* [15] kritische berichte. Zeitschrift für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften, 2, 1995.
* [16] Nikola Doll (ed.), Kunstgeschichte im Nationalsozialismus. Beiträge zur Geschichte einer Wissenschaft zwischen 1930 und 1950 [Catalogue for the travelling exhibition "Art History under National Socialism" held at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Bonn, 16 March to 29 April 2005, and Munich, Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, 11 May to 15 June 2005] (Cologne 2006).
* [17] Lynn H. Nicholas, The Rape of Europa (New York 1994); Jonathan Petropoulos, Kunstraub und Sammelwahn: Kunst und Politik im Dritten Reich (Berlin 1999); see also, Hector Feliciano, Le Musée disparu. Enquête sur le pillage des oeuvres d'art en France par les nazis (Paris 1995), English translation: The lost museum: the Nazi conspiracy to steal the world's greatest works of art (New York 1997).
* [18] Koordinierungsstelle für Kulturgutverluste Magdeburg (ed.), Beiträge öffentlicher Einrichtungen der Bundesrepublik Deutschland zum Umgang mit Kulturgütern aus ehemaligem jüdischen Besitz (Magdeburg 2001); Anja Heuss, "Die Sammlung Max Silberberg in Breslau", in Andrea Pophanken, Felix Billeter (eds.), Die Moderne und ihre Sammler. Französische Kunst in deutschem Privatbesitz vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik (Berlin 2001), 311-326.
* [19] Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, released in connection with The Washington Conference on Holocaust Era Assets, Washington, DC, December 3, 1998; www.state.gov/p/eur/rt/hlcst/23231.htm.
* [20] See www.herkomstgezocht.nl, www.culture.fr/documentation/mnr/pres.htm, www.nepip.org/, nationalmuseums.org.uk/index.php?pageID=spoliation, www.restitution-art.cz/, www.lostart.de.
* [21] The Second Hanover Symposium on Looted Jewish Book Collections took place at the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz State Library of Lower Saxony in May 2005, and a conference entitled "Future of the Lost Cultural Heritage" in Cesky Krumlov (Czech Republic) in November of the same year.
* [22] Koordinierungsstelle für Kulturgutverluste Magdeburg (ed.): Museen im Zwielicht. Ankaufspolitik 1933-1945. Kolloquium vom 11. und 12. Dezember 2001 in Köln/ Die eigene Geschichte. Provenienzforschung an deutschen Kunstmuseen im internationalen Vergleich. Tagung vom 20. bis 22. Februar 2002 in Hamburg (Magdeburg 2002); Grazyna Czubek, Piotr Kosiewski (eds.), Displaced Cultural Assets. The Case of Western Europe and the Problems of Central and Eastern European Countries in the 20th Century (Warsaw 2004); Grazyna Czubek, Piotr Kosiewski (eds.): Cultural Assets and the Problem of Property. The Case of Central Europe after 1989 (Warsaw 2005); Mecislav Borák (ed.), The Lost Heritage of Cultural Assets. The documentation, identification, restitution and repatriation of the cultural assets of WWII victims. Proceedings of the international academic conference in Brno 20.-21.11.2003 (Prague 2005).
* [23] Recently, e.g. Le grand pillage. Nouvelles questions sur le Luxembourg et la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale / Ausgeraubt! Neue Fragen an die Geschichte Luxemburgs im Zweiten Weltkrieg (The Great Pillage. New Questions on Luxembourg and the Second World War) in the Musée d'Histoire de la Ville de Luxembourg. www.musee-hist.lu/page_88607.html.
* [24] The joint statement is available online at: www.lostart.de/stelle/erklaerung.php3?lang=english.
* [25] Bundesbeauftragter für Kultur und Medien (ed.), Handreichung vom Februar 2001 zur Umsetzung der Erklärung der Bundesregierung, der Länder und der kommunalen Spitzenverbände zur Auffindung und zur Rückgabe NS-verfolgungsbedingt entzogenen Kulturgutes, insbesondere aus jüdischem Besitz (Berlin 2001); Nancy H. Yeide, Konstantin Akinsha, Amy L. Walsh, The AAM Guide to Provenance Research (Washington 2001); Veronica Albrink, Jürgen Babendreier, Bernd Reifenberg (eds.): Leitfaden für die Ermittlung von NS-verfolgungsbedingt entzogenem Kulturgut in Bibliotheken: www.ub.uni-marburg.de/allg/aktiv/Leitfaden.pdf.
* [26] Changes in library organization in the conquered Polish and Soviet territories produced artifical "duplicate copies", which were often discarded without further ado. See Anja Heuss, Kunst- und Kulturgutraub. Eine vergleichende Studie zur Besatzungspolitik der Nationalsozialisten in Frankreich und der Sowjetunion (Heidelberg 2000), 14.
* [27] "Verordnung des Reichspräsidenten zum Schutze des deutschen Volkes" (Reich President's Decree on the Protection of the German People, 4 February 1933), in Reichsgesetzblatt (Berlin), Part I, no. 8, 6 February 1933, 35-41; "Gesetz über die Einziehung kommunistischen Vermögens" (Law on the Confiscation of Communist Property, 26 May 1933), in Reichsgesetzblatt (Berlin), Part I, no. 55, 27 May 1933, 293; and "Gesetz über die Einziehung volks- und staatsfeindlichen Vermögens" (Law on the Confiscation of Property Used for Purposes Inimical to the People and State, 14 July 1933), in Reichsgesetzblatt (Berlin), Part I, no. 81, 15 July 1933, 479f.
* [28] Heinz Braun, "Zum Schicksal der Archive und Bibliotheken der deutschen Gewerkschaften", in Internationale wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung (IK), 1, 1998, [1]-36.
* [29] Werner Schroeder, "Strukturen des Bücherraubs: Die Bibliotheken des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes (RSHA), ihr Aufbau und ihr Verblei", in Zeitschrift für Bibliothekswesen und Bibliographie, 5-6, 2004, 316-324, particularly 316.
* [30] Ibid., 317.
* [31] Wolfgang Dierker, Himmlers Glaubenskrieger. Der Sicherheitsdienst der SS und seine Religionspolitik 1933/1941. (Paderborn, München [etc.] 2004), quoted in Schroeder, "Strukturen des Bücherraubs", 318.
* [32] Grit Nitzsche, "Die Bücherverwertungsstelle Wien", in Regine Dehnel (ed.), Jüdischer Buchbesitz als Raubgut (Frankfurt 2006), 67-72.
* [33] In Vienna alone, Sophie Lillie has listed 150 families or individuals who had their collections taken away from them. See Sophie Lillie, Was einmal war. Handbuch der enteigneten Kunstsammlungen Wiens (Wien 2003).
* [34] Czech officials responsible for restitution did, however, return 42 boxes of cultural objects to Prague in May 1946 alone. The cultural artefacts that whet the Nazis' appetite included the series of paintings by the Master of Hohenfurth, which were destined for the "Führer's museum" in Linz, as well as the collections of the castles of Konopiste, Roudnice, Opocno, and Hluboká. See Ladislav Cepicka, "Country Report. Czech Republic", in Spoils of War. International Newsletter, 5, 1998, 44-55.
* [35] Robert Luft, "Zur Bibliothekspolitik im Sudentenland und im Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren", in Vodosek and Komorowski, Bibliotheken während des Nationalsozialismus, 461.
* [36] Quoted in Werner Schroeder, "Beschlagnahme und Verbleib jüdischer Bibliotheken in Deutschland vor und nach dem Novemberpogrom 1938", in Dehnel, Jüdischer Buchbesitz als Raubgut, 27-36, quote on 29.
* [37] On the objects catalogued by each service, see Werner Schroeder, "Strukturen des Bücherraubs", 317f.
* [38] See Petropoulos, Kunstraub und Sammelwahn, 113.
* [39] See Willem de Vries, Sonderstab Musik. Music confiscations by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg under the Nazi Occupation of Western Europe (Amsterdam 1996).
* [40] Petropoulos, Kunstraub und Sammelwahn, 167.
* [41] Stanislao G. Pugliese, "Bloodless Torture: The Books of the Roman Ghetto under the Nazi Occupation", in Libraries & Culture, 3, 1999, 241-253.
* [42] Petropoulos, Kunstraub und Sammelwahn, 191. According to other accounts, Adolf Eichmann, who, as head of a RSHA special commando, organized the deportation of 440 000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, was also the one who initiated the dispatch of the Hungarian cultural assets. Significant portions of these objects are now located in Russia. See Catalogue of Art Objects from Hungarian Private Collections. Katalog proizvedenii izobrazitel'nogo iskusstva iz chastnykh vengerskikh kollekcii (Moscow 2003).
* [43] Quoted in Jan Tomasz Gross, Polish Society under German occupation. The Generalgouvernement, 1933-1944 (Princeton 1979), 75.
* [44] According to Anja Heuss, Kunst- und Kulturgutraub, 215. Ruth and Max Seydewitz quote similar figures based on a progress report from 2 May 1941, by an agent of the Trustee-General's Office. See Ruth and Max Seydewitz, Die Dame, 111.
* [45] Quoted in Andrzej Mezynski, Kommando Paulsen. Organisierter Kunstraub in Polen, 1942-1945 (Cologne 2000), 72. Available in Polish as: Kommando Paulsen. Pazdziernik-grudzien 1939 r. (Warsaw 1994). ATTENTION: This Polish book concerns only 1939.
* [46] Ibid., 73.
* [47] On the history of Ahnenerbe and its activities in France and the Soviet Union, see Heuss, Kunst- und Kulturgutraub, 205-249.
* [48] Mezynski, Kommando, 72.
* [49] Jacqueline Borin, "Embers of Soul. The Destruction of Jewish Books and Libraries in Poland during World War II", in Libraries & Culture, 4, 1993, 445-460. Putting a figure on destroyed or missing art is notoriously difficult. Thus, in 1946 the Soviet Union estimated its losses at 564 723 objects from 73 museums, 100 million books, and 87 million archival files. See Natalia Volkert, Der gegenseitige deutsch-sowjetische Kulturgutraub und die Restitutionsproblematik im Vergleich, available online at: www.initiativefortbildung.de/pdf/provenienz2004/volkert.pdf. More up-to-date figures may be found in the Catalogue of Art Looted or Lost during the Second World War, which now has over ten volumes. However, this catalogue does not always take into account restituted objects. More research is needed before anything can be said with certainty; Svodnyi katalog kul'turnykh tsennostei, pochishchennykh i utrachennykh v period Vtoroj mirovoi voiny. (Moscow, St. Petersburg 1999).
* [50] Marlene P. Hiller, "Bücher als Beute. Das Schicksal sowjetischer und deutscher Bibliotheken als Folge des Zweiten Weltkrieges", in Das deutsche Buch in Ostmitteleuropa, 1, 1995, 9-27, figures mentioned on 17f.
* [51] Apparently "seizures" by the army's archival and library services were also carried out in the Balkans. See Christina Köstner, "Bücherraub am Balkan. Die Nationalbibliothek Wien und der Belgrader Verleger Geca Kon", and Paul Gerhard Dannhauer, Stephan Kellner, "Hermann Gerstner (1903-1993) – ein schriftstellernder Bibliothekar als 'Ariseur'", in Dehnel, Jüdischer Buchbesitz, 96-106 and 107-119, respectively. More research is needed to see whether the German Army initially observed higher standards in dealing with cultural objects, which would then have declined as the war progressed and the tide turned against the Germans.
* [52] Including the collection of the Belgian industrialist Hugo Daniel Andriesse, who had fled Belgium in 1939. See Jacques Lust, "The Spoils of War Removed From Belgium During World War II", in Elizabeth Simpson (ed.), The Spoils of War. World War II and its Aftermath: The Loss, Reappearance and Recovery of Cultural Property (New York 1997), 58-63, in particular 61.
* [53] Verordnungsblatt des Generalgouverneurs für die besetzten polnischen Gebiete (Cracow 1939), 209.
* [54] Waltraud Bayer (ed.), Verkaufte Kultur. Die sowjetischen Kunst- und Antiquitätenexporte 1919-1938 (Frankfurt am Main 2001).
* [55] Bundesarchiv, B 323/485 through B 323/487: Polen-Einzelfälle.
* [56] Heuss, Kunst- und Kulturgutraub, 345-357. On Posse and the "Führer's museum", suffice it to say that he did not suppose Polish collections would "add much to the German stock of high art (paintings and sculptures)". See Seydewitz, Die Dame, 39. The failure of the German invasion of the USSR prevented him from laying his hands on the great collections of West European art in Leningrad and Moscow. On the "Führer's museum", see Birgit Schwarz, Hitlers Museum: Die Fotoalben Gemäldegalerie Linz: Dokumente zum "Führermuseum". (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar 2004).

The Europe beyond Europe
Outer Borders, Inner Limits
Berlin (2007)
Page 103 - 130


Georg Voruba

Expansion without Enlargement
Europe’s Dynamism and the EU’s Neighbourhood Policy

Even before the completion of the EU's eastern enlargement in 2004, the Commission had begun to think about what should happen next. It was clear that this enlargement would bring with it new relations of proximity and hence new problems for and new expectations of the EU. It was also clear, however, that dealing with these issues as they had been dealt with up to then, stabilizing the periphery by means of enlargement and promises of enlargement, was no longer an option.

The EU had reached the limits of its previous dynamism of development, in which integration and enlargement had functioned in such a way as to mutually reinforce each other. By the time of the 2004 eastern enlargement, at the latest, the number and heterogeneity of the member states had increased to such an extent that they were placing excessive demands on the EU's potential for cultural, organizational, and financial integration.[2] This overstretch made the contradiction between the deepening and the enlargement of the EU sharper, and this is the essence of the European Union's enlargement crisis.[3] This view that enlargement and the deepening of European integration openly contradict one another led to the widely shared conviction that the automatism of further enlargements of the EU had to be stopped.[4] But it was also clear that it could not be in the EU's interest to bring its expansion dynamism to an abrupt end, since this implied that there was a danger of a sharp clash of interests between the EU and its periphery. What was needed, therefore, was a concept that made it possible for the EU to continue to expand without necessitating further enlargement. How is it possible to have expansion without enlargement? This is the core problem around which the EU's neighbourhood policy revolves.

The short history (since 2002) of the EU's development of its programme for expansion without enlargement has a characteristic feature: With the passing of time, more and more countries on the periphery of the EU have been incorporated into the programme. This began in early 2003 with the Commission's Wider Europe concept, which covered Belarus, Russia, Moldova, and Ukraine. The next step was the Council's December 2003 Copenhagen decision, which adopted the Wider Europe concept and extended it to incorporate the countries involved in the Barcelona Process. In 2004, the expansion without enlargement programme was formulated anew in the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) strategy paper and extended to Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. At present, the European Neighbourhood Policy covers 16 countries on the periphery of the EU.[5]

The ENP concepts that were developed to stop the EU's automatic enlargement momentum are themselves subject to an analogous dynamism. Driven partly by the desire of individual countries on the periphery to be allowed to participate and partly by the interest of individual groups of member states in questions relating to stability and security, the circle of countries towards which the neighbourhood policy is directed has grown, as has the extent of the potential "ring of friends" around the EU that the neighbourhood policy is designed to bring into being.

One way of looking at this idiosyncratic tendency to expansion in the programmatic development of the ENP is to see it quite simply as the ironic return of an EU model of development that has evidently not been overcome. However, one can also ask: What are the reasons for this expansion dynamism, which has clearly persisted beyond the Union's rounds of enlargement? The relationship between the prosperous core of the EU and its periphery can be understood as a political deal. The terms of this deal between the EU and its periphery have changed, though, as enlargement policy has turned into neighbourhood policy. This affects what this policy is able to achieve.
Europe's dynamism
The interdependencies between the centre and the periphery of the European Union give rise to specific interactions that are the source of Europe's dynamism.[6] The central factor is the interest of the core of the EU in safeguarding its own existence as a politically stable zone of economic prosperity. The consequence of this dominant interest is that the core perceives its periphery in two different ways: on the one hand, as a source of various economic and political problems that damage the EU's extensive interest in stability and, on the other hand, as a protective zone that can serve to keep at bay problems arising in the more distant periphery. This ambivalent perception of the periphery – as both a source of problems and a solution to these problems – leads to the characteristic combination of exclusion and inclusion in the EU's policy towards its periphery.

The goal of an exclusion policy is to keep cross-border problems at a distance by closing borders. Of course, this kind of policy has only limited prospects of success. For one, there are technical reasons why attempts to close borders are ineffective against numerous kinds of cross-border processes. This applies particularly to cross-border environmental pollution, transmitted through the air or via water. Second, the effective closure of borders in response to certain cross-border processes can only be achieved by paying disproportionately high financial, political, and humanitarian costs. This applies in particular to the immigration controls put in place by states governed by rule of law and subject to immigration flows.

Third, attempts to implement exclusion policies can encounter difficulties in the stable zone of economic prosperity because the costs and benefits are unequally distributed across this zone and associated with a range of different interests. This applies particularly to the regulation of mobile transnational production factors, labour migration, and foreign direct investment. All in all, therefore, a policy of exclusion with the goal of safeguarding the prosperous core of the EU has no great prospect of success. Throughout the history of the EU, this has led repeatedly to the addition of a policy of calculated inclusion to an exclusion policy or to the replacement of exclusion by inclusion. As a result, inclusion has dominated EU policy towards the periphery.[7]

Calculated inclusion follows the logic of self-interested aid.[8] In the transnational context, self-interested aid is motivated by the interest of the country providing assistance in finding ways to solve problems that spread across borders in the foreign locations where they first arise. This might mean subsidizing the environmental policy of a poorer neighbour, for example, by modernizing outdated nuclear reactors. Self-interested aid can also take the form of assistance to the reform countries' economic reconstruction and political stabilization. This serves to reduce the incentive to emigrate. All in all, the policy of calculated inclusion dictated by the logic of self-interested help amounts to letting the poorer periphery share the prosperity of the core of the EU to a certain degree. This is the systemic reason why, when new members join the EU, they stress publicly that their contribution to regional stability benefits the whole of the EU. "Romania will not make any trouble or create any unrest," emphasized the Romanian prime minister in autumn 2006. "It will contribute a zone of stability and security for the whole of southeast Europe."[9]

Admittedly, there are limits to the policy of calculated inclusion. For one, this policy is associated with considerable financial outlays, which can affect its prospects of acceptance in the prosperous core. This problem is made worse by the fact that the policy of calculated inclusion costs money immediately, but its positive effects will only be seen later. Second, if a policy of calculated inclusion is to be successful, the countries of the periphery must be prepared to share responsibility for it. This is a decisive difference between an exclusion and an inclusion policy: An exclusion policy is a unilateral action taken by the prosperous core in relation to its periphery, whereas an inclusion policy can only function as cooperation between prosperous core and periphery.

This leads us to the question of how, and under what circumstances, the periphery is prepared to cooperate with the prosperous core in order to pursue a policy of calculated inclusion. This question is of decisive importance for the European Neighbourhood Policy.
The periphery's preparedness to cooperate
One certainly cannot assume in advance that the periphery will automatically be prepared to cooperate. This is because the EU pursues a combined policy of exclusion and inclusion towards its periphery. First and foremost, what the EU's policy of calculated inclusion means for the countries of the periphery is comprehensive economic modernization and political democratization. This policy may be very much in the interests of the countries of the periphery in the long term, but in the short term, it gives rise to costs that have to be paid by specific groups, especially in terms of higher unemployment and in the loss of previously privileged political positions. We therefore have to address the question of the conditions under which a country on the periphery will be willing and able to cooperate with the prosperous core of the EU in pursuing a policy of calculated inclusion. The question of who bears the costs is made even more problematic by the fact that EU policy amounts to a systematic combination of exclusionary measures taken by the EU itself and the transfer of exclusionary tasks to countries located in the less distant regions of the periphery.[10] One area where this is particularly noticeable is immigration policy. Economic support for neighbouring countries is made conditional on their preparedness to cooperate in the sphere of border control, to agree to shift defensive measures designed to deter immigrants onto their own territory, and to participate in deportation chains for illegal immigrants. In effect, then, one component of the EU's policy of calculated inclusion is that neighbouring countries are required to take on responsibility for exclusionary measures directed against third parties. These exclusionary tasks change the relationship between the prosperous core of the EU and its neighbours in a striking way. Performing exclusionary tasks for the EU presupposes a high degree of preparedness to cooperate on the part of the neighbouring country and will bring with it considerable costs: in material terms, because technical measures will have to be put in place at the borders and to deal with the repatriation of immigrants, and in political terms, because traditional relations with that country's neighbours will be disrupted.

This means that for countries bordering the EU, costs arise both as a result of the policy of economic and political modernization and as a result of assuming exclusionary tasks on behalf of the EU. There is therefore an even more urgent need for an answer to the question that has been posed: What motivates the EU's neighbours to cooperate with the Union within the framework of a policy of calculated inclusion, part of which is the requirement that they take on exclusionary tasks?

Up until the moment of eastern enlargement in 2004, the problem of the periphery's preparedness to cooperate with the prosperous core was repeatedly solved in the following way: The prosperous core intervened in its periphery by pursuing a policy of calculated inclusion. The first step was to offer limited participation in prosperity in return for preparedness to modernize and to pay the price of modernization. At the same time, the neighbouring countries were expected to take responsibility for exclusionary measures, in other words to act as a buffer zone between the EU and the even poorer, politically even more unstable and more distant periphery. Readiness to accept the costs of this policy was rewarded with the prospect of EU membership at a later date as a way of strengthening the neighbouring countries' acceptance of the policy of calculated inclusion. This was also designed to make it easier for the neighbouring countries to justify the costs of cooperation in the eyes of their own populations. Cooperation between the EU and its neighbours is therefore based on a political exchange: The neighbouring countries accept the burdens of modernization and the costs of the exclusionary tasks now in exchange for limited participation in prosperity now, and they are offered the prospect of EU membership together with full integration into the prosperous core later. It was only this sequencing of costs and smaller and larger gains to be expected from cooperation which ensured that the populations of the neighbouring countries would be prepared to play their part over the long term.
From enlargement to the neighbourhood policy
The basis of the European Union's current policy towards its periphery is the strategy paper "European Neighbourhood Policy".[11] The point of reference of this document is the 2004 eastern enlargement, which means

that the external borders of the Union have changed. We have acquired new neighbours and have come closer to old ones. These circumstances have created both opportunities and challenges.[12] [...] The European Neighbourhood Policy's vision involves a ring of countries, sharing the EU's fundamental values and objectives, drawn into an increasingly close relationship, going beyond cooperation to involve a significant measure of economic and political integration.[13]
This is an abundantly clear expression of the idea of concentric circles as the classical model of EU expansion. As in the past, the periphery's task is to develop economically and stabilize itself politically, which should (a) result in fewer cross-border problems landing on the EU's doorstep and (b) provide a buffer zone between the EU and its more distant periphery. Emphasis is placed repeatedly on the intention to ensure that no sharp borders between the enlarged EU and its "new neighbourhood" come into being. At the same time, though, it is clear that the relaxation of border regimes between the EU and its neighbours must lead to a build-up of border controls between the neighbours and their periphery. The EU's exclusion policy is thus shifted further outwards and continues beyond successive enlargements. There is an implicit admission that this in turn leads to tensions between the countries that now form the outer ring of EU members and their neighbours:

A Commission proposal for Regulations on the establishment of a local border traffic regime is currently under consideration by the Council and will, if adopted, make it possible for border area populations to maintain traditional contacts without encountering excessive administrative obstacles. The European Union may also consider possibilities for visa facilitation.[14]
The dominant consideration, though, is the EU's interest in setting up a buffer zone and giving the countries of the periphery the task of implementing exclusionary measures: "Facilitation by one side will need to be matched by effective actions by the other."[15] What this means in plain terms is that, if the EU eases the border regime between itself and a neighbouring country, that country must tighten up the controls in place on its borders with third states. Therefore:

the objective of the ENP is to share the benefits of the EU's 2004 enlargement with neighbouring countries in strengthening stability, security, and well-being for all concerned.[16]
It is impossible to overlook the structural similarities between enlargement policy and the European Neighbourhood Policy. In both cases, it is a question of bringing successive peripheries up to the standards of the EU core, and in both cases, more intensive economic relations, aligning the legal and economic orders with one another, and the intensification of all kinds of social relations are the methods used to bring this about and the expression of the fact that it is happening. The reasons for these similarities can be found at two levels. The first set of factors relates to continuities in the personnel involved. A number of the main actors concerned with the 2004 eastern enlargement were also among those centrally involved in developing the concept of the European Neighbourhood Policy. Supply and demand factors are likely to have been the cause here. On the one hand, once the eastern enlargement had been completed the relevant actors wanted to advance their careers further; in order to do this, they had to open up new problem areas in which they could offer a proven competence. On the other hand, the structural similarities in the problem constellation meant there was a high level of demand for the relevant expertise. "The top task force officials thus all have enlargement backgrounds."[17] These continuities in personnel form the basis of the transfer of ideas and rhetorical formulations from enlargement policy to the European Neighbourhood Policy.[18] Needless to say, individual career interests and the transfer of ideas alone cannot explain the development of the European Neighbourhood Policy adequately. These factors are embedded in an organizational momentum driven by the Commission's interest in accumulating competences at the cost of the nation-states.

The second set of causes of the similarities between enlargement and the neighbourhood policy results from the position of the European Commission in the institutional competition between the European and nation-state levels. The decisive factor here is that the Commission now has extensive and undisputed responsibilities in EU internal policy, but in foreign policy it has to wage a constant struggle for recognition of its competence. The EU's enlargement and neighbourhood policies are characteristically situated between internal and foreign policy. In terms of the initial situation, enlargement policy and neighbourhood policy refer to problems outside the territory of the European Union, i.e. they are in the first instance matters of foreign policy. From this point on, though, their paths diverge. Classical enlargement policy transposed its object from the sphere of EU foreign policy to that of internal policy. This suited the Commission, which had an interest in accumulating additional competences. With the completion of the rounds of enlargement, this mechanism by which issues are transposed from the external to the internal sphere is no longer available to the Commission. But the Commission is still interested in accumulating further competences, and the development of the neighbourhood policy is an attempt to extend the life of this transposition mechanism beyond the end of the enlargement policy.[19] "I admit that many of the elements which come to my mind are taken from the enlargement process."[20]

The prospect that the Commission might be able to extend its competence in foreign policy results from the dialectic of integration and enlargement. The dismantling of internal borders and the funds that are made available and administered at the community level mean that the European Union has reached a level of integration and of shared interests that makes it impossible for individual member states to continue to conduct a distinct policy towards their respective non-EU neighbours. Nevertheless, there are significant regional differences between individual members, or groups of members, in respect to the main focus of their interests in relation to the EU periphery.[21] There is no institutional provision for individual policy initiatives on the part of an EU member state towards its neighbours on the EU periphery, since an individual member cannot decide on the allocation of EU assistance funds to its own periphery; if any such policy is pursued, however, it brings with it such complications in relation to the interests of other member states that, in practice, the individual state has very little room for manoeuvre. For example, a number of member states argue that they should have a right to be involved in decisions on immigration policy taken by the southern EU member states, since they too are affected by these decisions.[22]

The southern member states, for their part, demand that the whole community should share the costs of their immigration policies because, they argue, this is in the interests of all EU member states. As a result of these complementary positions, there is now a clear trend towards greater community-level coordination of control of the EU's external borders.[23] This means that the deepening of EU integration leads to a more close-knit network of shared interests internally, and this in turn makes it impossible for individual member states to pursue their interests in relations with non-EU neighbours and so increases the demand for a "foreign policy towards neighbouring states" at the community level.

The neighbourhood policy has been designed as an offer put forward by the Commission, a policy that corresponds to the level of integration reached by the EU and will function as a foreign policy towards neighbouring states. It is in the first instance designed to be applied to individual neighbouring states. Enlargements are a matter of the complete acceptance of the acquis communautaire, but the neighbourhood policy is different; it involves "special partnerships", which are individually tailored to fit the potential of each bilateral EU-neighbour relationship. At the same time, though, the European Neighbourhood Policy concept does serve as a uniform framework within which a diverse range of individual regulations come together to form a consistent overall EU project, the idea of a "ring of friends". This project is directed by the Commission and represents the introduction of some community-level elements into the sphere of foreign policy.

Overall, the European Neighbourhood Policy does two things: It meets the need to develop a community-level "foreign policy towards neighbouring states", and it simultaneously satisfies the Commission's interest in accumulating competence in foreign policy.
The offer of a new political deal
I interpret the European Neighbourhood Policy here within the framework of the theory of Europe's dynamism as an attempt to extend the prosperous core's policy of self-interested aid to the periphery. Let us recall once again the political deal implicit in relations between the prosperous core of the EU and the periphery, which has produced the dynamism of successive EU enlargements: The EU expects countries on its periphery to accept the burdens of modernization and the costs of performing exclusionary tasks now and offers in exchange limited participation in prosperity now and the prospect of EU membership along with complete integration into the prosperous core later. What are the differences between the neighbourhood policy and enlargement policy with regard to costs and benefits to the centre and periphery respectively? As far as benefits to the EU are concerned, the ENP is designed to function in a way that is as close as possible to enlargement policy: political, economic, and cultural links to the EU together with comprehensive economic and political stabilization of the periphery. In the relevant EU documents, on the other hand, it is (unsurprisingly) the benefits to be enjoyed by the neighbours that are heavily emphasized:

The objective of the ENP is to share the benefits of the EU's 2004 enlargement with neighbouring countries in strengthening stability, security and well-being for all concerned.[24]
But what about the costs? The decisive difference is that the EU's costs are not as high and the benefits enjoyed by neighbouring countries are fewer. For the EU, the neighbourhood policy brings with it cost advantages in a number of dimensions: The partner countries do not accept the acquis communautaire. The main significance of this is that they remain outside the system of EU funds, that is to say they are not part of the community's redistribution mechanism, and the four classical EU freedoms apply to them only in cases where specific regulations are in force – unlike new members, who after enlargement can only be excluded from these freedoms temporarily and in exceptional circumstances for which reasons must be given. The partner countries conclude treaties with the EU, which means they are excluded from all EU decision-making processes. The neighbourhood policy thus makes it possible for the EU to save on all the costs that further enlargement would bring in terms of intensified competition (especially in the labour market) and of complicating political decision making, be it by unanimity or by majority rule.

What is to the advantage of the EU is simultaneously to the disadvantage of potential participants in the European Neighbourhood Policy: It is difficult for them to gain access to significant financial support, their access to EU markets is a privilege rather than a right, and they have no institutional right to have a say in EU affairs. In addition, they have failed to acquire the prestige that recognition as a potential EU member would have brought with it.

This weighing up of costs and benefits leads to the conclusion that if the political deal offered within the framework of enlargement policy – buffer zone function now in return for membership later – was the decisive factor that made it possible for relations between the EU's centre and periphery to function, and if the terms of this deal within the framework of the European Neighbourhood Policy have changed in a way that is to the disadvantage of the periphery, then it is an open question whether the buffer zone and stabilization function can still operate in this new framework. In other words: Will the neighbouring countries be prepared to make the same contribution as the framework of enlargement policy required while receiving much less from the EU in return?

Of course, this question can only be posed in these terms if the core problem of the neighbourhood policy, as I have laid it out here, rests on an accurate description of the EU's relationship with its periphery. We must note that the EU itself describes this relationship in very different terms.
The European Union as exporter of values?
In article I-2 of its constitution, the EU describes itself as a union based on "values". It is therefore logical that this should be followed by a statement that commitment to the values of Europe is an indispensable condition of membership (Art. I-1 (2)). There is a similar formulation in the text that sets out the European Neighbourhood Policy:

The privileged partnership with neighbours will build on mutual commitment to common values principally within the fields of the rule of law, good governance, the respect for human rights, including minority rights, the promotion of good neighbourly relations, and the principles of market economy and sustainable development.[25]
Let us put to one side, for the time being at least, the question of whether it makes sense to include "good neighbourly relations" and "the principles of market economy" in a list of "values". Whatever our view of this may be, the central status given to the export of "values" must be taken seriously in social-scientific terms, that is to say, as a piece of empirical data. For present purposes, there is no need either to adopt this commitment to certain values as our own position, or to question its authenticity from the standpoint of some kind of superior knowledge. Rather, we must look for the causes of the EU's programmatic commitment to the export of its values. What can the approach employed here, the theory of Europe's dynamism, contribute to the investigation of this question? The theory of Europe's dynamism explains the development of the EU in terms of calculations of interest made by the different actors and groups of actors. The main focus of attention is the interest of the core EU in securing its prosperity and stability by promoting prosperity and stability in surrounding areas. On this basis, we can investigate the export of values as an important instrument used to promote prosperity and stability. This theoretical perspective – that of treating values as instruments – has the advantage that it in no way obliges us to dispute their existence or acceptance (and so avoids any ridiculous posture that insists on exposing values as fraudulent), but it does make it possible to ask questions about the way limits are placed on the export of values as a result of the calculations of interest within which that export is framed. In this framework, one can also understand the curious classification of "neighbourly relations" and "principles of the market economy" as "values": They are preconditions of political stability and economic development in the periphery and thus essential to the interests of the EU's prosperous core. There are three empirical considerations which strengthen the hypothesis that the EU's export of values in the framework of its neighbourhood policy follows the logic of calculations of interest.

First, a comparison between different partner countries reveals that they are treated differently by the EU even though their "value deficits" are identical or very similar. This is incompatible with the logic of the export of values as an end in itself and strengthens the hypothesis that the varying degrees of geopolitical relevance of individual neighbouring countries are more important than the values they manifest. This could explain the EU's reluctance to push individual North African countries to comply with European values, given the importance of these countries in combating immigration and the competition between the European Union and the United States for political influence.[26]

Second, comparisons over longer periods of time show that one and the same country on the periphery can initially be kept at a distance by the EU with the argument that it has a value deficit, only to be recognized later on as a serious candidate for EU membership even if this deficit has not been overcome. From a value perspective, this behaviour is inconsistent. It suggests that a change in the strategic significance of a country or region is a more important factor in determining the EU's actions than problems relating to its values. This could explain why the EU's position towards Turkey's endeavours to join the Union changed after the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States.[27]

Third, the EU's relations with some countries on the periphery place it in a dilemma. The export of democratic values can lead to the strengthening of certain political forces in a way that will be detrimental to cooperation with the EU – either because one can foresee that political forces hostile to the EU would exploit the political space opened up by democracy to establish themselves on a permanent basis, or because democratization would lead to a temporary destabilization of political conditions and the costs of this transition period will be too great and their outcome considered too uncertain. "The goal of short-term stability therefore overshadows the goal of improving long-term prospects for democracy."[28]

All three of these ways of looking at the relationship between the export of values and the interest in stability make it clear that the political stability of the periphery is of primary importance for the EU's neighbourhood policy, and they show that the export of values can only be pursued in the framework of and as part of a policy designed to promote the goal of stability.[29]

I am not arguing that the EU's talk of values needs to be unmasked as rhetoric without any binding substance. This would be both theoretically senseless and empirically wide of the mark, since the EU does indeed try hard to strengthen the protection of human rights, democratic institutions, and the rule of law in its neighbourhood. These efforts are a part of the means to the ends of prosperity and pacification, which modifies their substance (or may do so – this is an empirical question), but by no means renders the export of values worthless. On the contrary: One can argue persuasively that the only way to achieve long-term improvements in the countries bordering on the EU is by spreading "values" as a matter of strategic interest and by means of the interactions between the improvement of democratic standards and greater prosperity and political stability.

The result of this examination of the export of values hypothesis is as follows: The success of the neighbourhood policy depends very much on the readiness of the periphery to cooperate, and this in turn depends on whether these countries accept the offers made by the European Neighbourhood Policy within the framework of the political deal represented by this policy. It is clear from the comparison that the neighbourhood policy offers the periphery less than enlargement policy did. Social scientists examining this policy have already noted: "The ENP requires much of the neighbours, and offers only vague incentives in return."[30] In short: "The carrot is smaller."[31]

This does not amount to a final verdict on the European Neighbourhood Policy's prospects of success. The decisive factor in relation to the neighbours' readiness to cooperate is how they see and evaluate the offer made by the policy on a spectrum of political possibilities. There is no reason why this spectrum must be exhausted by the alternatives of neighbourhood policy or full membership.
The neighbours' calculus of cooperation
An expansion mechanism is built into the development of the European Union. This mechanism is a result of the shared interests and interaction between the prosperous core of the EU and its periphery. The core of the EU has an interest in an economically prospering and politically stable periphery, and this core has grown as a result of enlargements; up to now, this has led to repeated rounds of enlargement. The prospect of EU membership has proved to be a strong incentive for the peripheries, prompting them to carry out economic and political modernization and to take on functions on behalf of the core EU. Enlargement policy thus rested on a political deal between centre and periphery: acceptance of the buffer zone function and the burdens of modernization now in return for EU membership later. Within the framework of the theory of Europe's dynamism, it can also be shown that although the periphery's commitment to the EU's values plays a role, this has an instrumental character with regard to the core's dominant interest in stability, and it is this interest that establishes the framework for the export of values from the EU to the periphery. This means that the crucial question for the policy of expansion without enlargement, i.e. the transition from enlargement policy to European Neighbourhood Policy, is whether the periphery is prepared to accept these burdens without having any prospect of future membership – in other words, whether the deal between centre and periphery also works when the conditions are less advantageous to the periphery.

Right from the start, the relevant EU actors knew very well that the success of the neighbourhood policy depended on whether the countries on the periphery would find the offers it made them sufficiently attractive. Therefore, the decisive question is:

The goal of accession is certainly the most powerful stimulus for reform we can think of. But why should a less ambitious goal not have some effect?[32]
What constitutes an incentive that could prompt a neighbouring country to cooperate with the EU on the basis of the European Neighbourhood Policy? It would be a mistake to assume that the countries on the periphery necessarily base their calculations about cooperation with the EU on the comparison between the prospect of membership and the neighbourhood policy. This assumption overlooks the possibility that these countries might have other alternatives, or at least believe they do. An analysis of the prospects of cooperation between the EU and the periphery must therefore reconstruct the calculations of (expected) costs and benefits made by the countries of the periphery themselves. Reducing the calculations of the countries on the periphery to a choice between membership and the neighbourhood policy would mean assuming that they see no alternatives to the EU. And this would mean treating the exception, dependence on the EU without alternatives (or an absence of competition because the EU is so attractive), as the rule. This would be analytically mistaken and politically naive. The EU may see the situation realistically when it describes itself as "a pole of attraction for its neighbours",[33] but it should not assume when designing its neighbourhood policy that neighbouring countries find it irresistible.

This means that the decisive factors which provide a basis for readiness to cooperate are the comparisons neighbouring countries themselves make between the European Neighbourhood Policy and the alternatives to that policy they themselves see.

In this regard, there are major differences between individual countries and groups of countries on the periphery. It would be impossible to investigate each case in detail here. On the basis of the analysis so far, we can formulate a two-dimensional analytical schema: It is clear that readiness to cooperate depends, on the one hand, on what a neighbouring country actually expects from the EU and, on the other hand, on the alternatives a neighbouring country may see to the offer represented by the neighbourhood policy.

It would be analytically profitable and politically sensible to evaluate the Country Reports that are drawn up in the course of the European Neighbourhood Policy, in order to establish their implications for the cooperation calculations of the EU's neighbours. It would make sense to start from the following four variants:

- A country expects little from the EU and has few alternatives. The consequence is very little interest in the ENP, especially because the country sees itself as having fundamental problems and does not think the EU can do much to solve them. As a result, the ENP can hardly come into play here.

- A country expects a great deal from the EU and has few alternatives. One indication that a country sees its position this way is that it employs extravagant moral rhetoric to reinforce its expressions of desire to move closer to the EU or to join. This is most unlikely to lead to a partnership under conditions that the country on the periphery will find satisfactory. This may result in irrational reactions that take the country in the direction of political isolation. As a result, the neighbourhood policy can come into play to a certain extent, but the resulting cooperation is unstable because it is accompanied by permanent political frustration.

- A country expects little from the EU and has good alternatives available. A neighbouring country in this situation is in a (relatively) strong position. It is very likely that this constellation will lead to cooperative relations with the EU outside the European Neighbourhood Policy.

- A country expects a lot from the EU and has good alternatives available. This constellation leads to a country persevering in its long-term efforts to join the EU. The neighbourhood policy comes into play in this constellation, but it fails to address the central problem of the European Union: "We cannot go on enlarging forever."[34] The precondition of this cooperation calculation, which leads to stable relations of cooperation as envisaged by the European Neighbourhood Policy, is therefore the abandonment of the central goal of that policy: expansion without enlargement.



* [1] Romano Prodi, "A Wider Europe: A Proximity Policy as the key to stability", Sixth ECSA Conference, Brussels, 5-6 December 2002.
* [2] Jürgen Gerhards, Kulturelle Unterschiede in der Europäischen Union (Wiesbaden 2005); Michael Hölscher, Wirtschaftskulturen in der erweiterten EU (Wiesbaden 2006); Richard Münch and Sebastian Büttner argue against unquestioningly accepting the assumption that growing heterogeneity is an obstacle to integration in their article, "Die europäische Teilung der Arbeit. Was können wir von Emile Durkheim lernen?", in Martin Heidenreich (ed.), Die Europäisierung sozialer Ungleichheit (Frankfurt am Main 2006), 65-107.
* [3] Georg Vobruba, "The Enlargement Crisis of the European Union: Limits of the Dialectics of Integration and Expansion", Journal of European Social Policy, 1, 2003, 35-62; Maurizio Bach, "The Enlargement Crisis of the European Union: From Political Integration to Social Disintegration", in Maurizio Bach et al. (eds.), Europe in Motion: Social Dynamics and Political Institutions in an Enlarging Europe (Berlin 2006), 11-28; Sonja Grimm and Wolfgang Merkel, "Die Grenzen der EU: Erweiterung, Vertiefung und Demokratie", in Jens Alber and Wolfgang Merkel (eds.), Europas Erweiterung: Das Ende der Vertiefung?, WZB-Jahrbuch 2005 (Berlin 2006), 183-206.
* [4] See, for example, "Frankreich warnt vor neuer Welle der Erweiterung", Süddeutsche Zeitung, 13 December 2005, 6.
* [5] Karen E. Smith, "The Outsiders: The European Neighbourhood Policy", International Affairs, 4, 2005, 757-773.
* [6] Georg Vobruba, Die Dynamik Europas (Wiesbaden 2003).
* [7] For a historical and systematic examination of the shifts in borders associated with these processes, see Mathias Bös and Kerstin Zimmer, "Wenn Grenzen wandern. Zur Dynamik von Grenzverschiebungen im Osten Europas", in Monika Eigmüller and Georg Vobruba (eds.), Grenzsoziologie. Die politische Strukturierung des Raumes (Wiesbaden 2006), 157-184.
* [8] Georg Vobruba, Gemeinschaft ohne Moral (Vienna 1994), 185-187.
* [9] "'Die Rumänen werden keinen Ärger Machen.' Interview mit Calin Popescu Tariceanu über den bevorstehenden EU-Beitritt", Süddeutsche Zeitung 4-5 November 2006, 10. Similar references to the functions of their countries in providing stability for the EU have been made by a former Polish president, reported in "Aleksander Kwasniewski im Gespräch: Der Westen scheint müde, wir sind frisch", Tagesspiegel, 11 March 2000, 6, and Viktor Yushchenko, at the time candidate for the Ukrainian presidency, "Wir wollen eine europäische Ukraine", Süddeutsche Zeitung, 30 September 2004, 9. For more on this point, see Vobruba, Die Dynamik Europas, 23.
* [10] Paolo Cuttita, "Das Mittelmeer als Wohlstandsgrenze", in Eigmüller and Vobruba, Grenzsoziologie, 251-257.
* [11] "Commission of the European Communities, European Neighbourhood Policy", Brussels, 12. 5. 2004, COM (2004) 373 final.
* [12] Ibid., 2.
* [13] Ibid., 5.
* [14] Ibid.
* [15] Ibid., 18.
* [16] Ibid., 3.
* [17] Judith Kelley, "New Wine in Old Wineskins: Promoting Political Reforms through the New European Neighbourhood Policy", Journal of Common Market Studies, 1, 2006, 32.
* [18] Elsa Tulmets, "New Modes of Governance in EU's External Relations: Explaining the Transfer of Ideas and Methods from Enlargement to the Neighbourhood Policy", European University, Florence 2006, unpublished paper.
* [19] Ibid., 16.
* [20] Prodi, "A Wider Europe".
* [21] Georg Vobruba, "Internal Dynamics and Foreign Relations of the European Union", in Bach et al., Europe in Motion, 59-77.
* [22] Monika Eigmüller, Grenzsicherungspolitik (Wiesbaden 2007).
* [23] One response to this has been the setting up of a European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the European Union (better known as FRONTEX), see Official Journal of the European Union, Council Regulation (EC) No. 2007/2004, 26 October 2004.
* [24] "Commission of the European Communities, European Neighbourhood Policy", 3.
* [25] Ibid. For another similar formulation, see Regulation (EC) No 1638/2006 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 2006, which lay down general provisions establishing an European Neighbourhood and Partnership Instrument (Preamble and Art. I (3)).
* [26] Michael Emerson et al., "The Reluctant Debate: The European Union as Promoter of Democracy in Its Neighbourhood", CEPS Working Document 223/2005, Brussels, 22.
* [27] Ibid., 12. On the status of geo-strategic arguments for Turkish membership, see Vobruba, Die Dynamik Europas, 90.
* [28] Kelley, "New Wine in Old Wineskins", 46.
* [29] It is another question entirely whether the European Union needs some kind of reference to values for purposes of identity-formation (it probably does), and this question in turn needs to be distinguished from that of whether ties to the EU based on values actually exist (they probably do not). On the first question, see Rainer M. Lepsius, "Identitätsstiftung durch eine europäische Verfassung", in Robert Hettlage and Hans-Peter Müller (eds.), Die europaische Gesellschaft (Konstanz 2006), 109-127, and on the second, Sylke Nissen, "European Identity and the Future of Europe", in Bach et al., Europe in Motion, 155-174.
* [30] Smith, "The Outsiders", 772.
* [31] Kelley, "New Wine in Old Wineskins", 36. The same image is used by Smith in "The Outsiders", 770.
* [32] Prodi, "A Wider Europe".
* [33] Ibid.
* [34] Ibid.

The Europe beyond Europe
Outer Borders, Inner Limits
Berlin (2007)
Page 205 - 244


Dimitrii Furman

The Origins and Elements of Imitation Democracies
On Political Developments in the Post-Soviet Space

After the collapse of the "socialist camp", the formerly communist countries and the Soviet Union uniformly proclaimed similar goals: democracy and a market-based economy. In practice, however, the way those countries evolved afterward hardly had anything uniform about it. The fundamental differences between Russia and the countries of eastern central Europe, including those of the Baltic region, are obvious.[1] In the countries of eastern central Europe, democratic constitutional states of the western European and North American type were formed. In those countries, different political forces submit to a common set of rules, handing the reins of power over to one another at regular intervals. In Russia, by contrast, "no-alternative" presidents have ruled, men who use legal and democratic institutions only as camouflage, and turn their power over to a designated successor. If one were to compare Russia only with the constitutional states of eastern central European countries, one could easily be lured into over-rating the uniqueness of its post-Soviet development and political system.

In fact, Russia's system is by no means unique. Systems of the same type can be found in many Asian and African countries. Nor does the post-communist world lack parallels for the political developments in Russia: Indeed, its case is not even a particularly unusual one. One can find similar systems in all of the countries of the Common wealth of Independent States (CIS), with the exception of Moldova and of three countries (Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan) where such systems have already completed their life-cycle.[2]

Comparing the pathways of political development of different CIS states and the political systems they led to is a task of colossal complexity. This article is merely an initial attempt to sketch out the outlines of such a comparison. In it, I hope to identify the following:

– the preconditions in Russia and the other CIS states favourable to the emergence of such systems;

– the underlying logic providing the basis for their development;

– the roots of their decline and collapse;

– future prospects opened by the collapse of such regimes;

– and the inter-relationships between the various processes within the CIS and the potential for outside influence.

Prerequisites for "imitation democracies"
Despite the enormous diversity of political systems in the modern world, two dominant types clearly emerge as the most prevalent. The first of these is genuine democracy, which has been firmly established in the most highly developed countries as well as in many less-developed states that used to be considered "Third World" countries. The second type consists of those systems that, for lack of a universally accepted term, one could call "managed" or "imitation" democracies, i.e. systems in which power is concentrated in the hands of a president who rules behind a façade of democracy and rule of law. Systems of this type are in place in Russia and most of the other CIS states, as well as in many other countries. Imitation democracies differ from the other types of non-democratic systems: non-constitutional monarchies, which are buttressed by tradition; blatant dictatorships, where power is based on the military and a democratic façade is unnecessary, and totalitarian systems, where pretensions of democracy can be kept to a minimum because ideology has provided an alternative. Admittedly, even the totalitarian systems of the twentieth century – the communist systems of that era and, to a lesser extent, the fascist ones as well – could not completely dispense with a democratic façade. Elections did take place, though no choices were available; there were constitutions, though they contained extra-legal clauses (such as that referring to the CPSU as the "leading and guiding force"); parliaments did exist, though they approved all decisions unanimously. Communist regimes called themselves "socialist" or "people's democracies". This systematic hypocrisy on the part of totalitarian regimes testifies to the fact that even in their bloom, totalitarian ideologies were unable to provide a fully satisfactory alternative to democratic legitimization. Most of the non-democratic political regimes that currently exist are imitation democracies. This suggests that certain conditions encouraging the establishment of this type of system are met in today's world.

With the doubtful exception of Islamic fundamentalism, there are no longer any ideological alternatives to a social order based on democracy that are worthy of serious consideration. Democracy is the sole remaining way of legitimizing political power. Traditionalist non-democratic regimes, such as Saudi Arabia's, are relicts of the past. Their survival can be put down to fortuitous circumstances, and they do not provide an appealing model for other countries to emulate. The totalitarian communist systems in North Korea and Cuba are also hangovers from the 20th century, the age of totalitarian ideologies. Military dictatorships are, by nature, temporary phenomena associated with exceptional circumstances. Over time, they transform themselves into real democracies, or – when dictators organize manipulated elections or plebiscites – sham democracies.

This absence of ideologies that could legitimize an undemocratic regime, even taken together with the general spread of certain democratic ideas and principles, does not mean that all societies are ready for democracy. A functioning democracy requires either that specific cultural preconditions exist, or that social and cultural development is at a relatively advanced level.

One who accepts a standard but cannot comply with it begins to counterfeit compliance, deceiving both himself and others. If there is no ideological alternative to democracy available, and the cultural and psychological conditions for a genuine, functioning democracy have not been established, it is possible for political systems of the type that are widespread in the territory of the former Soviet Union to emerge: undemocratic regimes that counterfeit democracy. Those prerequisites were met in the CIS countries at the beginning of their post-Soviet development.
Universal democratic discourse
When the republics of the former Soviet Union were undergoing the transition from communism to post-communism, essentially no alternatives to democratic concepts were available there. Certain democratic ideas and principles had already taken root, thanks to communist ideology. Just as they accepted the necessity of elections and a constitution, people in the USSR took it for granted that power had to come from the people, be subject to elections, and "serve the people". One natural form of the protest against Soviet power had been to denounce the lack of democracy and point out the difference between reality and declared principles. So there was an attempt to transition to a genuine democracy after the fall of the Soviet regime, by giving real substance to the formal institutions of Soviet democracy.

No ideological alternatives to democracy emerged later on, either: In all of the CIS countries, the debates between presidents and their oppositions took place within the framework of democratic discourse. Essentially, only one ideological justification for the authoritarian regimes in the CIS has been put forth: Heidar Aliev, Askar Akaev, Nursultan Nazarbaev, and – in a milder form – Vladimir Putin refer constantly to the idea that "our countries" are not ready for full-fledged democracy. Instead, they claim, these countries are still in the preparatory stage. Therefore, their reasoning goes, one should not measure them by Western standards or pressure them unduly, for that would be to risk causing the overall process to fail. It would not occur to any ruler in a CIS country to dispense completely with democratic legitimization. Elections can be reduced to a ritual, yes – but it is a ritual no regime could do without. Constitutions may serve as fig-leaves, true – but fig-leaves without which one wouldn't appear in public.

Despite this universal democratic discourse, however, there have only been five examples of the peaceful, constitutional transfer of power to an opposition in the sixteen years since the Soviet Union dissolved. Three of those have occurred in Moldova, whose evolution has differed fundamentally from that of the other countries. In both other cases, the new presidents immediately set to work constructing "no-alternative" regimes of their own: Aliaksandr Lukashenka as successor to Viacheslav Kebich in Belarus and Leonid Kuchma succeeding Leonid Kravchuk in the Ukraine. The consistent invocation of democratic values goes hand in hand with consistently undemocratic developments. Democratic principles, though acknowledged, are not followed. Why is this?
Absence of precedence
The situation cannot be explained simply by invoking the "heavy burden of the Soviet legacy". Democratic societies have emerged in the eastern central European and the Baltic countries despite the communist past.[3] Societies in the communist countries developed along the same general lines that the rest of the world did, though more slowly and idiosyncratically. Thus the formerly communist countries were, for the most part, better prepared for democracy by the time the system collapsed than they had been when it was first established.[4]

The lack of readiness for democracy within the post-communist CIS countries has less to do with the legacy of the old system than with more deeply-rooted cultural and historical factors. I would like to list a few of the more obvious here, without going into the most basic cultural factors impeding the democratization in the area.[5]

First of all, unlike the countries of eastern central Europe, none of the CIS countries could refer back to a historical experience of democracy while constructing a post-Soviet democratic system. Democratization efforts after 1917 were so shortlived and so unsuccessful that the post-Soviet experience can be viewed as essentially the first attempt. On the contrary, some of the countries, Russia and Uzbekistan above all, have a strong authoritarian tradition that is firmly established in the consciousness of their populations. In historical perspective, Russia's greatness cannot be separated from figures like Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great or Stalin, while the national pride of Uzbekistan centres on the figure of Tamerlane.

If none of the CIS countries can identify a clear model for democracy in their own history, there are also no role models to be found among countries with which they share strong cultural ties. Of course, the model of the European and American democracies has exerted enormous influence and continues to do so. However, as those states are very remote culturally from the CIS countries they cannot play the same role there that Finland and Sweden have played for Estonia and Latvia. Turkey can act as a kind of role model for the Turkic-speaking, Islamic countries of the CIS, but Turkey is not really a model of stable and highly developed democracy. Moreover, the Turkish model must compete for influence with those of other Islamic countries. Culturally, the CIS states continue to be dependent to a great extent on Russia, a country that really cannot serve as an example of successful democratization.

It is completely natural that democratization is made more difficult by absence of a democratic precedent, the lack of experience with democracy and the absence of clear models to follow. In this region, though, the process is exacerbated all the more by the fact that it coincides with two other transitions that are just as complicated.

They are, first, the transition from a socialist economy to a market economy. Under socialism, which lasted for more than two generations, people grew unaccustomed to market institutions and private property. This meant that introducing the market to the CIS states was a task almost as unprecedented as introducing democracy.

The second transition is the one from Soviet empire to modern nation-state: This was also a first for the populations of the CIS states, unlike for those of eastern central Europe (here, once again, with the exception of a few unsuccessful attempts during the Russian Civil War).[6] If one then factors in the sudden and unexpected collapse of the USSR,[7] it is clear that in 1991 the peoples of the CIS were in the situation of a person who is suddenly and unexpectedly thrown into a pool of water. Add to that that the person in question never learned to swim and, in fact, never had the opportunity to do more than observe the activity from afar. Though he may well understand that he has to swim and, indeed, try his utmost to do so, it would be quite easy for such a person to fall into panic and despair.
The political regimes in the CIS countries
After the collapse of the USSR, all of the CIS countries were quick to announce their desire to create constitutional democracies. The chaos that broke out throughout the region of the CIS resembled, in milder form, the turmoil of the Russian empire after the end of the tsars' rule. There is probably no need to mention the terrible economic situation that came about in the CIS countries at the start of the 1990s any more than I need to remind the reader of the wars, uprisings and coups that wracked the territory of the former Soviet Union in that same period. The structures of the state disintegrated so completely in some countries that criminals were able to rise to power: Sangak Safarov in Tajikistan, Tengiz Kitovani and Jaba Ioseliani in Georgia, and Suret Huseinov in Azerbaijan. In view of this situation, the population's desire for "order" was a totally natural one. A survey taken in Kazakhstan in 1998 reflects the attitude of the entire CIS population at the time. Asked which system would be capable of solving Kazakhstan's social problems, 4.4 percent of those polled cited communism, 7.3 percent socialism, 5.9 percent capitalism, 2.8 percent "Western-style democracy", and 2.3 percent Islam. But 56.9 percent said, "Doesn't matter, the main thing is to establish order."[8]

People feel a sense of nostalgia for the calmer years before the revolutions, though it is not one that results in a conscious effort to reinstate the Soviet system – since communist ideology is dead – or encourages the spread of other antidemocratic ideologies – since the latter no longer exist in modern culture.

A certain degree of chaos is natural with any change of political and/or social system. A sense of nostalgia for the system now gone is just as natural. This kind of overly positive assessment of the past occurs in all countries that have experienced anti-communist revolutions. Yet there are fundamental differences in its consequences – depending on the intensity of the nostalgia (and the difficulties that evoke it).

In countries that were better prepared for the transition to democracy than the CIS states, it brought about the electoral defeat of the radical forces in power during the years of the revolution. This caused power to shift to more moderate figures who still had ties to the old elites, though they had adjured the communist ideology. The most striking examples of this are the electoral victory of Algirdas Brazauskas over the Sajudis movement in Lithuania and the election in Poland that unseated Lech Walesa in favour of Aleksander Kwasniewski. This first democratic transfer of power definitively transformed what had been the rule of victorious democrats into the rule of democracy and law, leading to the development of a system where regular changes of government are the norm.

When these same factors are present in somewhat different proportions – slightly more anarchy due to the revolution, a somewhat more vociferous call for an end to that anarchy and a society somewhat less ready for democracy – then the outcomes are quite different. Instead of the institution of regularly changing governments and the strengthening of democracy through the electoral victory of the heirs of the "pre-revolutionary" past, the existing regime consolidates its position, rendering the transfer of power impossible. The regime itself begins to take on "pre-revolutionary" authoritarian features, and imitation democracies are formed. Such systems are based on the manipulation of public opinion and the falsification of expressions of the public will. Yet it would not be possible to establish them were there not a corresponding demand on the part of society, did it not consent to the manipulation and falsification.

Unquestionably, the uncertain crises in various CIS states in the early 1990s could have ended differently: The imitation democracies that ultimately emerged were not the only possible outcome. But at that time the CIS countries' chances of becoming real democracies were probably minimal. Ukraine and Belarus may have had the best chance: There, at least, a peaceful transfer of power did occur. The fact that democracies based on the rule of law did not develop there is substantially bound up with the personalities of Kuchma und Lukashenka. Imitation democracies were the most probable and most natural result of this constellation. The personalities of the people in power, their past (Boris Yeltsin's anti-communism and Lukashenka's nostalgia for the communist era, the intellectuality of Levon Ter-Petrosian, and the "plainness" [prostota] of Emomalii Rakhmon formerly [Rakhmonov]), and the individual nuances of their ideologies lent a specific colouring to their regimes, but had little influence on their basic core or the logics of how they evolved.
From the logics of development to the logics of behaviour
The population's need to put the turmoil of revolution behind them was a factor encouraging the creation of imitation democracies. The logics of the behaviour adopted by the presidents are another such factor. A one-man regime that merely counterfeits democracy cannot be introduced through legal channels. It can only be imposed using illegal means. Yet the further a president moves to solidify his regime in this way, the more certain looms the threat of legal consequences should his grasp on power slip. By signing the Belovezha Accord, Yeltsin set the seal on the collapse of the USSR in spite of the fact that he had no public mandate in Russia to do so (or, even in spite of a mandate to do completely the opposite). Through that action alone, he made it immensely more difficult for himself to hand over power. The opposition were hardly likely to resist the temptation to hold him responsible for the "destruction of a great state": should it come to power, he would almost certainly face legal proceedings, with charges ranging from exceeding his competence to high treason. But if it might perhaps have been possible to ensure Yeltsin's personal safety had he stepped down in 1992 or early 1993, such a move was entirely out of the question in the wake of the bloody dissolution of the Russian Parliament in October of 1993.[9]

The same logics are reflected in the behaviour and motivations of other heads of state. The catalogue of actions available to a president who has opted to create a "no-alternative" regime includes the revocation of the valid constitution and the introduction of unconstitutional legislation, the manipulation of election and referendum results, pressure on the judiciary, and trumped up criminal charges against political opponents and others, and extends to the "mysterious" disappearance and murder of opposition figures.

There were many criminal acts committed in the course of privatization in addition to the crimes designed to strengthen the regime directly. Since public officials were able to act with no oversight whatsoever, these processes inevitably led to the plundering of the state's assets, an act in which both the presidents themselves and their close associates were involved. Hence, the further a one-man regime is strengthened and expanded, the more difficult it becomes for the president to deviate from the path once he has taken it, and the more likely it is that he and his supporters will face trials, imprisonment and financial ruin when he steps down – unless he transfers power to a carefully selected successor and secures his own immunity from prosecution. It is indeed very easy to start down this path, but next to impossible to leave it later on.

In the various CIS countries, the one-man regimes underwent similar phases, taking on similar forms. We will now turn to take a closer look at some of these phases.
The dissolution of uncontrollable parliaments
Yeltsin's bloody conflict with parliament was the most important milestone in the development of an authoritarian regime in Russia. However, it was not the only clash of this kind to occur in the CIS. In the first half of the 1990s, conflicts between presidents and parliaments played out in all of the CIS countries – with the exception of Turkmenistan, where the parliament was completely subordinate to the president right from the start. These conflicts were due to the fact that the first parliaments were elected in the era of Mikhail Gorbachev, when the authorities were not yet able to exert more than minimal influence on elections, and society was entirely caught up in a wave of democracy. The parliaments were not yet "manageable"; their members perceived their own mission as a noble one, and their presidents were still convinced of the weighty significance of their office.

The parliaments were the greatest obstacle to the consolidation of presidential power and the creation of an authoritarian system.[10] Disputes between the presidents and the legislatures were aggravated by the fact that the old Soviet constitutions – with numerous amendments – were still valid in the CIS states, and there was no clear division of competencies among the different branches of government. Under these circumstances, the conflict between the presidents and the parliaments escalated into anarchy. Since parliamentary representatives were closer to the voters than the president and his entourage were, public dissatisfaction with market economy reforms throughout the region centred on the parliaments. Even stronger than the protest against the reforms, though, was the demand for public order, so populations tended to side with their president in his conflicts with parliaments: Presidents stood for order, while parliaments symbolized the chaos of democracy.

Only in Russia did a conflict of this type result in bloodshed. In Kazakhstan, the president dissolved the parliament without resorting to violence, but he did so twice in a row (1993 and 1994). Parliaments were also dissolved in Kyrgyzstan (1995) and Belarus (1996). Moldova, whose political development has generally been very idiosyncratic, is the only country in which the conflict between the presidents (first Mircea Snegur, then Petru Lucinschi) and parliament ended in the defeat of presidential power and the establishment of a parliamentary republic.
Elimination of former comrades
One aspect of Boris Yeltsin's dispute with the parliament was his personal conflict with Speaker of Parliament Ruslan Khasbulatov and Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoi, who had taken parliament's side. There are parallels in other countries for this as well: in Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbaev clashed with the speaker of parliament Serikbolsyn Abdildin and removed the country's vice president, Erik Asanbaev from office. In Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, the presidents, Askar Akaev and Islam Karimov clashed with their respective vice presidents, Feliks Kulov and Shukhrullo Mirsaidov. In Azerbaijan, there was a conflict between Heidar Aliev and Rasim Kuliev, the speaker of parliament. Finally, in Belarus, Aliaksandr Lukashenka fell out with many of his former supporters as well. All of these conflicts follow the same psychological pattern, one typical for the development phase of authoritarian regimes. Initially, the president is surrounded by the people who fought at his side in the struggle for power and who see him as the first among equals rather than as their boss. Inevitably, the emerging authoritarian system acts to suppress such figures, since they resist being demoted from comrades in arms into mere followers. (All of the obvious differences aside, such conflicts play out according to a pattern similar to what occurred between Hitler and Röhm as well as Stalin [and later Khrushchev] and other members of the Politburo.)
Adoption of new constitutions
Once he has defeated parliament, the president can push through a new constitution, one that grants him far-reaching powers and restricts the competences of the other branches of government. Such constitutions allow one-man regimes to function without being in constant violation of constitutional law. Through them, the regimes acquire quasi-legal form. Presidents even attempt to use them to protect themselves from imaginary risks. For example, the constitutions of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan do not even include a procedure for removing a president from office, while in Russia and Kazakhstan, the procedure has been made so complicated that it would be virtually impossible to implement. Revealingly, none of the constitutions in CIS states establishes the office of a vice-president: The presidents are no longer willing to tolerate another official who has been elected by the people, and they want to ensure that they have a free hand in the choice of their successor.

Since the provisions of the new constitutions are well-suited to the one-man regimes, those regimes have a tendency to enshrine them as "sacred" texts. This stands out in stark contrast to the casual attitude of those same presidents towards the constitutional standards in force before the new laws were passed. One-man regimes are not, by their very nature, constitutional states. According to the rules of the game, even those rules introduced by the president himself, sooner or later, it would be possible for someone else to win. Thus, a constitution, even one drawn up according to the president's own instructions, remains a mere matter of form that can be changed or simply brushed aside at any time.

For example, all of the constitutions initially included language limiting the president's term in office, but the relevant articles were later amended. In Tajikistan, for instance, a constitutional amendment extended the presidential term from five years to seven in 1999, and in 2003, a further change allowed the president to rule for two seven-year terms. Uzbekistan and Belarus also saw the passage of constitutional amendments allowing the president's term in office to be extended and making him eligible for unlimited re-election.

Kazakhstan provides a striking example of how presidents deal with constitutions. In 1993, parliament adopted a constitution that ran counter to the interests of Nazarbaev. Nazarbaev thereupon unconstitutionally dissolved parliament. But the president was not happy with the newly elected parliament either and dissolved it again in 1994. In 1995, he held a referendum on extending the president's term in office to 2000, in open disregard of the constitution. Somewhat later, another referendum was held to adopt a new constitution that had been designed by the presidential administration and ought thus to have been ideal from his perspective. However, taking his cue from of a propitious (for him) political situation in 1998, Nazarbaev decided not to wait for the end of the term that had been granted to him by the referendum, but instead to call for new elections, thereby violating not only the new constitution, but the results of the referendum as well. In addition, several constitutional amendments were passed, including one that eliminated the age restriction on the presidency and one that extended his term in office. Hence Nazarbaev has held office under three different constitutions – and has violated all three of them.[11]
Methods for securing power
Constitutions lend a relatively stable outer form to the one-man regimes. However, maintaining such a regime requires the systematic prevention of any attempts by opposition forces to destabilize it. It is essential to detect potential risks early and act to avert them. An exhaustive presentation of the diverse range of methods and measures used in the CIS states to establish and maintain political stability is beyond the scope of this article, so I will limit myself to naming only the most important of them. – Controls on the media: Television is the most important in this respect, as the most effective mass medium with the widest reach.

– The passage of expedient laws on elections and political parties: The government enacts laws making it difficult or even impossible to register political parties. High percent thresholds are set, making it harder for certain parties to enter parliament. Furthermore, new regulations are issued, making it possible to keep unwanted candidates off the ballot. For instance, in 1998, a presidential decree in Kazakhstan empowered the courts to bar from elections any candidate who had committed a violation of administrative law within one year of the election date. With that, Nazarbaev's most important rival, Akezhan Kazhegeldin, was knocked out of the race.

– Controlling electoral commissions and the systematic manipulation of elections: All one-man regimes in the CIS manipulate election results. True, in countries like Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan "manipulation" is no longer quite the right term, since the elections there are so non-free and so ritualized that there is no longer any need for it. In other countries, the regime employs its "administrative resources" actively throughout the campaign and elections, including the vote-counting process. Results are manipulated even when it is clear that the genuine results reflect the desires of the president, because the people responsible locally tend to compete with one another for the honour of being the district that posts the best results. So while there can be no doubt that a majority of Belarusians voted for Lukashenka in the 1996 referendum as well as in the 2006 election, there can be no less doubt that their results had been manipulated.

– Establishment of pro-president parties: At the start of the 1990s, all of the parties that existed in the CIS had been formed independently of the people then in power. However, being the member of a party that was not established by the president which has an ideology and platform that are independent of him inevitably ties the president's hands. So heads of state tend to distance themselves from all parties, usually in an early stage of their regime, portraying themselves instead as the president of the entire nation. The exceptions are Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, whose presidents immediately founded their own parties, which they controlled directly, drawing on their CPSU party organization to do so.

Over time, however, presidents feel a growing need for parties to serve as a mechanism for testing loyalties, selecting staff, and additional managing activities. As a result, pro-president parties are set up, with ideologies and platforms that are limited essentially to support for the regime. In Russia, this is United Russia (Edinaia Rossiia), in Kazakhstan the Fatherland's Ray of Light party (Nur-Otan, formerly Fatherland, or Otan), in Azerbaijan the New Azerbaijan party (Yeni Azerbaycan), and in Tajikistan the People's Democratic Party (Hizbi Demokrati-Chalkii). It is quite possible for such regimes to experiment with pseudo multi-party systems. For example in Kazakhstan, in addition to the Fatherland party, there were until December 2006 two "supplementary" pro-Nazarbaev parties (the Civic Party and the Agrarian Party), but in December 2006 both of them merged into Fatherland, which was then renamed Fatherland's Ray of Light. New parties can also be established (All Togetherm, or Asar). In this way, the illusion of party diversity is created. There is also a multiparty system in Uzbekistan, in which the parties struggle to outdo one another in declaring their loyalty to the president.
Privatization and power
Establishing and maintaining a one-man regime is not merely a political process, but one with social and economic dimensions as well. The privatization of state property in almost all CIS states in the 1990s had social, economic and political significance. It also served to strengthen the one-man regimes. Since there were practically no social control mechanisms governing privatization, the process became one of the "distribution" of the state's assets by the executive, accompanied by numerous legal violations. Therefore it was in the new owners' interests to propitiate those in power, for their chances of being "appointed" a millionaire depended upon it. It was also in their interests to uphold the regime: Should the opposition come to power, privatizations might be reversed (this did take place to some extent in Georgia and Ukraine following the "colour revolutions". This puts a means of controlling these new owners into the hands of the president: At the slightest hint of disloyalty, the president could order investigations into their economic activities or irregularities in the course of privatizations (which they themselves had encouraged at the time) and prosecute their opponents solely for violations of commercial law. Proceedings of this type involving real or imaginary violations of criminal or commercial law are underway in Russia (against Boris Berezovskii, Vladimir Gusinskii and Mikhail Khodorkovskii), in Kyrgyzstan (against Feliks Kulov), Azerbaijan (against Rasul Kuliev), Kazakhstan (against Akezhan Kazhegeldin, Galymzhan Zhakiyanov and Mukhtar Abliazov), and Belarus (against Andrei Klimov and others). One-man regimes are incapable of establishing a normal legal environment for a market economy. They are not at all interested in doing so, however, because that would entail the loss of their control over the economy, which could lead to the loss of control – including political control – over society as a whole.
The dynamics of control and the system's momentum
One-man regimes are established and strengthened using the methods described above and by other means. Presidents are driven by the logics of their own actions to attain greater and greater control over their societies. It is essential that the president emphasizes that there is no alternative to his power. This inevitably leads to an extension of his control to cover a greater and greater area and the elimination of all alternative players in more and more arenas. The president moves forward from suppressing genuine opponents to creating conditions that make it impossible for any opponent to emerge: Combating real dangers soon gives way to a battle against potential or even imaginary threats. Next to the no-alternative president emerges a no-alternative parliament, then no-alternative media, etc. The logics at work here can be observed very distinctly in Russia, where the presidential regime has been extending its control over society with the utmost success since 1991. The other regimes are proceeding in a similar fashion though.

By now, this process has developed a momentum of its own, a self-reinforcing dynamic that presses onward almost without assistance on the part of the presidents. The bureaucracy is driving it forward, since its interests lie in reinforcing the president's power. Every official appointed by the president endeavours to display his loyalty as prominently as possible and avert dangers to the regime with the utmost vigilance.

However, it is apparent that these regimes can also evolve in another direction. Given internal pressure from the opposition and external pressure from the West in some countries the control over the society appears to flag once a certain level has been attained; under such conditions the desire to maintain power may take the form of limited concessions to the opposition and democracy. This is what happened in Ukraine, where Kuchma, who was uncertain of the victory of his designated successor (and perhaps did not entirely trust him anyway), decided to try to curtail the powers of the next president by means of constitutional amendments rather than continue expanding the powers of his office. Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan also experienced similar periods of "liberalization".

"Liberalization" and "democratization" of this type are never more than a façade: At issue is always an attempt to disguise the nature of a one-man regime and extend its life-span. However, such measures can contribute to an environment favourable to regime change and a transition to democracy.
Power transfer as a time of crisis
All presidents must come to terms with the fact of their own aging and secure their own safety as well as that of their families and loyal followers by turning power over to a person they trust. Each time this occurs there is an accompanying risk of political crisis. The transfer of power cannot help but embolden the opposition. It also inevitably brings to a boil conflicts between "court factions" backing different candidates for succession. Naturally, presidents have a tendency to transfer power to those they trust the most, their children. One-man regimes therefore have a very natural tendency to turn into quasi monarchies. So far there have only been two cases where power has been transferred by a president to his designated successor: one in Russia and one in Azerbaijan. In the Russian case, Yeltsin did not have a "suitable" family member available, and in Turkmenistan, Saparmyrat Niyazov, who had not named a successor upon his death in December 2006, was succeeded by Gurbanguly Berdimuhammedov, but in Azerbaijan, power was transferred from father to son. Inner-familial power transfers are very probable in Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan; in Kyrgyzstan, such a transfer was thwarted by the "Tulip Revolution".

There is always a crisis associated with the transfer of power. Various outcomes are possible. It may simply fail, allowing regime change. Not every relative who may be designated as successor has the qualities necessary to continue the regime. Moreover, transferring power to one's children reveals all too clearly that the regime has dispensed with any basis in law, depriving the successor of the necessary legitimacy. However, if power is transferred to a relatively "new" man, as was the case in Russia, one who cannot be tied to the "sins" of his predecessor, the regime can take hold and be "rejuvenated". The effects of such a "rejuvenation" treatment do not last for very long, however.

The lifespan of authoritarian regimes is the subject of rhythms similar to those of a living creature. At first, the regime is weak and unstructured. Then it grows stronger and stronger and takes on a clear outline. But after its prime, it enters a period of aging and decline.
The decline of "imitation" democracies
One can divide the factors contributing to the decline and fall of imitation democracies into two major categories: those linked mainly to internal developments within the regime and those that have more to do with the evolution of the society at large. We will examine first those factors that result from the regime's natural aging process and take effect independently of any societal developments. One important factor is the loss of feedback. An authoritarian regime is a system in which those in power gradually lose touch with the processes actually at work within society. The further elections are transformed into rituals and falsehoods and the more completely the media is subjected to government control, the more dilute the flow of information concerning public sentiment becomes. The president surrounds himself with people who share his perspective and his expectations concerning himself and their country. Personality cults grow up quite naturally. This process has taken on particularly grotesque dimensions in Turkmenistan under "Turkmenbashi" Niyazov. But Aliev, Nazarbaev, Karimov, Lukashenka and other presidents also have their own cults. Having established their position as no-alternative rulers, the presidents themselves begin to believe in the exceptional characteristics that are ascribed to them in order to justify that position.

Just as the president's surroundings and the media he controls reinforce his belief in his own colossal intellect and extraordinary merits, so too do they strengthen his conviction that the country is progressing splendidly under his rule, populated by a prosperous people who love their president. The extra information supplied to him by his intelligence services, which is not made accessible to the public, treats only highly specific aspects of reality. In essence, the president relies on the same distorted information that is served up to the rest of society by the system he created: He watches the same television stations and reads the same newspapers.

The bizarre mixture of reactions during the colour revolutions made it apparent that the leaders of the CIS states live in a world of illusion: The presidents explained those revolutions by alluding to the sinister machinations of foreign powers, proclaimed their certainty that a similar revolution would be impossible in their countries due to their own exceptional qualities and popularity (this from Akaev just a few days before he fled the country). At the same time, though, they feared that the same thing might indeed happen to them, as a result of secret powers at work in their own countries.
Criminalization and the loss of control
Corruption plays a larger role in imitation democracies than it does in other types of non-democratic regimes. Dishonesty is inherent to this type of system, because the systematic violation of all declared principles and laws previously enacted is integral to its nature. This distinguishes their presidents from traditional monarchs, military dictators and even totalitarian rulers, who have no need to cloak themselves in a disguise of democracy. The president is dependent on the local authorities who ensure his victory in elections and referenda; on the judges who issue the rulings he needs against his adversaries; on the "oligarchs", who could, theoretically, finance the opposition; on the generals, who could potentially refuse to put down the opposition at a critical moment and on the intelligence services, which could form secret alliances with the opposition. However, he cannot rely on the ties to his subordinates that are provided for military dictators by army discipline, for totalitarian rulers by their ideological bonds to the machinery of power and for monarchs by traditional loyalty. The president is therefore forced to offer his followers material advantages, in other words, to bribe them. In this way, corruption and criminalization become integral to the system.

Yet with that comes an increasing loss of control over the state and society. Corruption corrodes the communications system within the state apparatus. Paradoxically, the pre-sident's actual ability to control lessens as his consolidation of power proceeds. If presidential decrees run counter to the interests of the machinery of government, that machinery may simply ignore them.

A system held together by material interests alone will collapse like a house of cards in a crisis. As the colour revolutions have shown, the presidents have no genuine staunch supporters. Unlike democratically elected presidents, Shevardnadze, Kuchma and Akaev were left to stand alone at the hour of need. Even Yeltsin, who did manage to transfer power to a designated successor, was very soon forgotten by all.
Survival of the weakest
Corruption leads to the deterioration of the governing elite. But corruption alone is not responsible for this decline: The system of social mobility typical of these regimes also plays a role. When it comes to appointing a deputy or immediate subordinate, no one is going to name an uncontrollable, incisive personality liable to outshine his superior. So the systematic dominance of "bureaucratic" social mobility leads to an equally systematic deterioration of the quality of the elite. In imitation democracies, the principle of bureaucratic mobility gains the upper hand, supplanting other mechanisms. At the start of the 1990s, when the system had not yet fully taken shape, there were plenty of opportunities to advance into the elite without the sanction of the leadership. A great many "self-appointed" people took advantage of those opportunities. It was not long though, before such channels were blocked. Since then, all distinctive personalities, even those who support the president, have been removed from his entourage. Formally, members of parliament are elected, but in reality they are appointed like other officials. The positions in the upper echelon of the industrial hierarchy have already been filled; uncontrollable "oligarchs" are being eliminated. Thus the only people remaining in leading circles are those who have been placed there by people at the upper levels of power. This has led to a systematic decline of the elite as a whole.
Loss of legitimacy
The natural impulse on the part of the presidents to extend the sphere of their control transforms democratic and constitutional institutions into little more than fiction, which grows increasingly obvious. The elections, now completely predictable, are transformed into a ritual: Their outcome is no longer in question. However, these imitation democracies have no source of legitimacy other than that of elections. Were it not for the self-deceit on the part of society and the deception practised by those in power, such systems could provide no justification for their own existence. Yet once a certain degree of control has been attained, the deception is no longer tenable.

The greater the regime's control over society, and the more predictable its election results, court rulings and media reports, the more its rulers forfeit their legitimacy. The phenomena associated with this decline would appear even if the societies themselves did not change, but evolve and change they do.

Towards the end of the Gorbachev era and during the early post-Soviet period, societies in CIS states were overwhelmed with a flood of unexpected and incomprehensible changes. This intensified the desire for a "strong hand", creating fertile psychological soil for the growth of imitation democracies. Yet much of that which seemed new and threatening at the time has since become a normal part of everyday life. People have grown accustomed to private property and market prices and become used to the absence of a rigid official ideology and to political and civic freedoms, if limited in scope. They have learned to live under new circumstances; they have, in short, adapted. This is one of the key reasons why gross domestic product is on the rise throughout the CIS and why the standard of living has ceased to fall. On the one hand, to a certain extent this counts in favour of the one-man regimes, since it serves as evidence of their effectiveness and lowers the risk of spontaneous protest. On the other hand, though, those same processes have reduced desire in the population for a "strong hand".

The natural generational shift only strengthens this "habituation" factor. In the perception of people whose views were formed under the USSR, and who retain at least some memory of the Stalinist terror, the late Soviet period was mild and liberal, while those same people equated the liberalization under Gorbachev with unstructured and dangerous freedom. For younger people, though, the liberal conditions under today's regimes are something natural and normal. There is no doubt that the generation that grew up in the post-Soviet era is better prepared psychologically for democracy than the Soviet generations were.

The growth of opposition to the one-man regimes is also crucially bound up with changes in the structure of society. Over the past years, a new civic elite has taken form, one that, though dependent on the state, is far less so than was the old nomenklatura. Part of that elite would like to see a system of rule of law that could protect them against arbitrariness on the part of the authorities.

Another new phenomenon is the opposition's success in overcoming internal divisions. Initially the presidential regimes confronted two separate opposition groups. Each hated the other enough to consider the regime as the lesser of two evils. On the one side were the Communists, along with their ideological and structural heirs and spin-offs and, on the other side, were the anti-communist democracy movements.

Gradually, the situation is changing. A transformation is underway throughout the opposition movements of the "left", though to different degrees in different countries. They are distancing themselves from communist dogmas, and starting down the same path – in other forms and under other circumstances – that the former communist parties in eastern central Europe took before them. Then, too, a distinct disillusionment can be detected in the anti-communist movements. Combined with the general pressure exerted by the regime, this has made it possible for opposition groups marching under different banners to find common ground in democratic demands of a general nature. The partisan feuding between equally powerless opposition parties is giving way to the common struggle against the regime to force the introduction of new "rules of the game". More or less organized and stabile alliances between socialists and communists on the one side and democratic forces on the other have emerged in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus. A corresponding tendency can be detected in Russia as well.

There are several other factors that contribute to weakening the one-man regimes and inciting opposition. The public has been growing increasingly weary of the men who have held the reins of power now for decades. Additionally, there is the example of eastern central Europe and the high level of development of the democratic states in general.

In some CIS states, these factors can contribute to a certain degree of liberalization. The transition of the CIS states to democracy is certain to be accompanied by profound political crises, however, for it entails the loss of power of the presidents (or of their designated successors), who have every reason to try to retain power by any possible means, and who have created systems that render the peaceful and legal accession to power on the part of the opposition essentially impossible. It is easier to imagine a traditional monarch introducing a constitution, or a dictator sending his army back to the barracks (there are historical examples for both of those cases) than it is to imagine a president who, having constructed a one-man regime, elects to destroy it with his own hands, contrary to his own interests and instincts and to the detriment of his friends and followers, thus bringing about the victory of his adversaries. As yet there have been no examples of "revolutions from above" in the CIS. However three imitation democracies have already been brought down as a result of a "revolution from below".
The fall of the imitation democracies
To date, three regimes that took the form of imitation democracies have been overthrown by revolutions in the CIS region. This enables us to draw certain general conclusions about the fall of such regimes.[12] All CIS countries have the same type of regimes, with one and the same mode of operation and developmental logic. As a result, their similarity extends to their collapse: The revolutions follow a very uniform scenario.

The first point is that all three successful revolutions, along with several failed attempts (in Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Armenia), were associated with elections. Naturally, this is not a coincidence. These systems always feature elections and other elements of democracy, and those features are never more than façades. The contradiction between reality and declared principles is inherent to the system. Accordingly, system crises are the result of the extreme amplification of this contradiction and ultimately lead to its elimination.

The regime consistently stage manages elections and falsifies their results with the tacit acceptance of society. At some point, however, the population withdraws that acceptance and balks at yet another attempt at falsification. The people take to the streets in protest, demanding an investigation into official election results. The presence of crowds in the streets amounts to a threat of force. A war of nerves begins. A thousand unpredictable factors influence the conflict's outcome, but ultimately there are only three scenarios possible.

In the first scenario, those in power do not dare use force. They yield, as we saw in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan. In the second case, the attempt to use force fails because the military refuses to obey orders. No such case has occurred yet, but we will probably see one eventually. In the third scenario, those in power refuse to back down, and the crowds are dispersed, thus ending the protest since demonstrators are neither numerous enough nor sufficiently well organized to resist.

The first two scenarios lead to the fall of the regime. The third version only postpones that fall. There is no doubt that every election in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Armenia, and Belarus will be accompanied by new attempts by the opposition to foil the electoral fraud. This means that the ultimate outcome is predetermined: Sooner or later, one of those attempts will succeed.

Revolutions in the wake of elections, or rather of electoral fraud, are a natural scenario in imitation democracies. It is clear, though, they are not possible in every country. A legal opposition, a certain degree of latitude for self-organization within the society and relatively free elections are prerequisites for such a revolution.

Once a certain degree of severity has been reached, a scenario of this kind can no longer occur. In Turkmenistan or Uzbekistan, for instance, such a development would be practically unthinkable. In those countries, the elections have been so ritualized that they are not the subject of any expectations whatsoever. It is now impossible for society to organize legally. This provides the regimes in question with a certain extra margin of stability, but it also means that their end will come unexpectedly, and that it will almost certainly involve bloodshed.

The colour revolutions provide a model that can apply in the case of more liberal regimes: The events that unfolded in Uzbekistan's Andizhan provide a view of the opposite extreme.
Developmental variations
The fall of the imitation democracies is only a matter of time. It can lead to different results, however. As I pointed out above, the regime's fall is the result of two processes. These two processes are interwoven, but should be defined separately for analytical purposes. They are, first, the deterioration of the regime due to system-inherent factors, and second, the evolution of the society, for which the framework provided by the political system becomes too restrictive. What happens after the regime's collapse depends on the relative weight of each of those two factors. If the system breaks down primarily due to the fact that society has outgrown its regime, then a democracy will take shape. This was the case in Ukraine and – though less definitively – in Georgia.

If the collapse is the result of the internal deterioration of the regime, and the society has not yet reached a developmental stage that would allow it to maintain a stable democracy, then the cycle will begin anew, with alternating and equally unstable anarchic democracies and dictatorships. This is a phenomenon that can be observed in the recent history of many "Third World" countries.

This outcome, though not inevitable, is certainly the most probable result of the developments in Kyrgyzstan. With the overthrow of the Akaev regime, the situation in the country has retuned in a certain sense to where it started in 1990-91. It is entirely possible that a new imitation democracy, similar to Akaev's, will emerge there after the current period of chaotic democracy, just as a new authoritarian imitation democracy emerged in Indonesia under General Suharto after the fall of President Sukarno.
Possibilities of outside influence
The CIS is more than a region composed of countries having the same type of regime coexist and develop parallel to one another. It is also the territory of the former Russian Empire and the USSR. CIS states have close historical and cultural ties with one another, above all, through Russia and the Russian language. Moreover, the CIS is an international organization that lends structure to the region and has the "latent" function of covertly contributing to sustaining imitation democracies. The close ties among CIS countries mean that processes and events that occur in one of them have an immeasurably greater impact on the others than do processes and events that play out in non-CIS countries. Colour revolutions excite the opposition and trouble the leadership in all CIS countries. Conversely, the successful suppression of a crisis and smooth transfer of power to a successor, such as those in Russia and Azerbaijan, inspire presidents and serve as a warning to opposition movements. For this reason, the presidents of all CIS countries, regardless of their relations otherwise, have a common interest in keeping their colleagues and neighbours in power and can rely on each others' support in the hour of need. In a way, one might compare the CIS to the anti-revolutionary "Holy Alliance" of the crowned heads of Europe in the post-Napoleonic era. It is an alliance of presidents against the opposition movements, one in which a central role, naturally, falls to Russia's president. In critical situations, when their hold on power grows unsteady, the presidents of the CIS states have turned to Russia as their natural ally, and they will continue to do so.[13]

On the other hand, the democratic countries do try – sometimes a little harder, sometimes a little less so – to help democracy take root in the CIS region by keeping authoritarian regimes in check and supporting the democratic opposition. That is why every democratic opposition automatically positions itself as anti-Russia and pro-West. The same tug-of-war that once went on inside the "socialist camp" continues within the CIS, though at a different level, with less intensity and gentler methods. Yet although the CIS is a "field for the battle" between Russia and the West, neither, in my opinion, can influence events in the CIS states to more than a very limited extent.

Russia has only relatively modest assistance to offer to the presidents of the other CIS countries. Post-Soviet Russia is far weaker than the USSR was; it is far more dependent on the outside world and lacks the ideological motivation that came into play in Soviet times. So it cannot extend to the post-Soviet regimes the kind of "fraternal assistance" that the USSR provided to Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. The colour revolutions have shown that Russia is not in a position to come to the rescue of neighbouring regimes in a crisis situation.

The opportunities for the West to influence events are also limited, however. Of course, the leading democratic countries, which are considered model democracies, can prevent the post-Soviet presidents from resorting to too-harsh authoritarian measures, since their good opinion has a certain legitimizing function for these rulers. But when confronted with a genuine threat to the regime, this is a very minor consideration. Hence, although the late Azerbaijani president Aliev had a quite pro-Western orientation, there was never a possibility that he would refrain from transferring power to his son for the sake of his reputation in the West.

Furthermore, the pressure for democratization from outside has never been exerted consistently and probably never will be. The authorities in CIS countries can keep it to a minimum by invoking the bogeyman of destabilization and extremism. In Russia, the regime was highly successful in this quarter by pointing out the risk of a takeover by ("red-brown") communists and Russian nationalists. In Central Asia, it is Islamic radicalism that plays this role.

These risks are not mere invention. However, it was largely the one-man regimes themselves that created them. In a country where no regular transfer of power takes place, and where the population is not allowed to express its dissatisfaction peacefully and legally, it is only natural that some of the protest will flow into extremist channels.

It is true that the retention of radical elements in the ideology of the Communist Party and the radicalism of the new youth movements in Russia have created and are perpetuating the risk that a new regime established in the event of an opposition victory will be even more authoritarian than the current one. However, it is also clear that the radical tendencies within politics in Russia are directly bound up with the nature of the present regime, which has made it impossible for either the "left" or the "right" opposition movement to come to power by legal and non-bloody means. By contrast, the electoral victory of the Communists in Moldova – the only CIS state where a one-man regime has not been created and where it might be possible for the opposition to come to power by legal and peaceful means – by no means led to the creation of an authoritarian regime. On the contrary, it served to fortify a system based on the regular alternation of governments and accelerated the transformation of the Communist Party there.

If Russia and Moldova represent two opposite approaches to responding to the risk of communist radicalism, then Tajikistan and Uzbekistan embody two different methods of combating Islamic extremism. Despite a long and brutal civil war, the Islamic movement in Tajikistan did not turn toward extremism and was able to integrate into the society following the peace agreement. By all appearances, no "Islamist" threat exists in Tajikistan today. Should one emerge, it could only be as a result of a transformation of Rakhmon's regime. The situation in Uzbekistan is quite different. The danger posed by Islamic radicalism is indisputably considerably greater there now than it was in the beginning of the 1990s, before the suppression of the democratic opposition. It is equally apparent that strict monitoring of any expression of Islamic piety on part of Islam Karimov's regime has encouraged the spread of Islamic extremism. If someone can be subjected to police interrogation or lose his job simply for complying with the requirements of Islam, the radicalisation of Muslims is, quite simply, inevitable.

One-man regimes create a vicious circle: They themselves generate the risks of destabilization and extremism so that the democratic states view them as the "lesser evil" and turn a blind eye to their behaviour and fierce suppression of the opposition. This can cause the risks of destabilization and extremism to increase.

Even the targeted use of influence on the part of the democratic countries on the political development of CIS countries can yield only limited results, and it can play a decisive roll only in specific moments of crisis. The democratization of the CIS states cannot be brought on by external influence: It must be the result of internal processes. The most important influence that the democratic states can exert has nothing to do with conscious political decision-making. It lies instead in their function as a role model. Just as the example of the free countries eroded the foundations of the communist regimes, so are the achievements of the democratic states, European integration and the EU accession of the new post-Communist democracies of eastern Europe and eastern central Europe undermining the one-man regimes in the CIS countries by virtue of their example.



* [1] A very good comparison of the political systems of Russia with those of the Baltic states is provided by S. Nisten-Khaarala, "Sravnenie politicheskich organov i konstitucii Rossii i baltiiskich stran – kul'turnaia obuslovlennost' i stechenie obstoiatel'stv", in E. Zadorozhniuk, D. Furman (eds.), Strany Baltii i Rossiia: Obshchestva i gosudarstva (Moscow 2002).
* [2] There is an extensive and uncharted body of literature on developments in post-communist Russia. I will only mention one book here, with whose authors I agree in many respects: Peter Reddaway, Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russian Reforms (Washington, D.C. 2001). See also: Dmitrii Furman, "Nasha politicheskaia sistema i ee tsikly", in Svobodnaia mysl'-XXI, 11, 2003. The literature on developments in other post-Soviet states is similarly diffuse. However, there are very few comparative resources that examine multiple countries, such as the annual Freedom House report, Nations in Transit: Civil Society, Democracy and Markets in East Central Europe and Newly Independent States (New York, since 1995).
* [3] The communist system survived longer in what are now the CIS countries (again with the exception of Moldova) than it did in eastern central Europe. There is one country, though, that was communist for just as long as the USSR, but that transformed into a real democracy after its collapse: This is the remarkable and seldom considered case of Mongolia.
* [4] This is made clear by a comparison of the pre-and post-communist situation of all former communist countries, with no exception, regardless of whether they turned into stable democracies or had to accept a setback and are now imitation democracies. For instance, it is clear that the Baltic states were about as ready for democracy in the interwar years as Belarus is today: Following a brief period of democracy, an authoritarian regimes similar to the Belarusian system today emerged in the Baltic states. It is also clear that Russia and Kazakhstan were both considerably better prepared for democracy in 1991 than they were in 1917.
* [5] Naturally, it is no coincidence that the most successful post-communist democracies in eastern central Europe and in the Baltic region are those that were influenced by the Western forms of Christianity, i.e. Catholicism and Protestantism. No less accidental is the fact that no democratic system has yet developed in an Islamic CIS country. There are also very few Islamic democracies outside of the CIS. For more detail, see Dmitrii Furman, "Divergentsiia politicheskikh sistem na postsovetskom prostranstve", in Svobodnaia mysl'-XXI, 10, 2004.
* [6] The historic experience of the Russian people, who created an empire and dominated it, is the precise opposite of the experience of the peoples conquered by the Russians and absorbed into their empire. Still, the Russians and these other peoples do share a common lack of experience with a nation-state of their own. Getting used to life without empire is difficult for both Russians and non-Russians.
* [7] In March of 1991, a referendum on the future of the USSR was held in all of the republics of the USSR except the Baltic states, Georgia, Armenia, and Moldova. In it, 76.4 percent of those who voted declared themselves in favour of maintaining the union, while 21.7 percent voted against doing so, Pravda, 27 March 1991. Yet the USSR ceased to exist that same year. Of the three heads of republics who declared the end of the USSR in the Belovezha Accord, only one, Ukraine's Leonid Kravchuk, had a mandate to do so from his people, a majority of whom had voted for independence in a referendum.
* [8] V. Dunaev, "Konfliktuiushchie struktury kazakhstanskoi modeli mezhetnicheskoi integratsii", in Tsentral'naia Aziia i Kavkaz, 6, 1999, 14-15.
* [9] On the development of the regime under Yeltsin, see Liliia Shevtsova, Rezhim Borisa El'tsina (Moscow 1999), available in English as Lilia Shevtsova, Yeltsin's Russia: Myths and Reality (Washington D.C. 1999).
* [10] For a systematic discussion of authoritarianism and authoritarian systems, see Margarete Wiest, "Beschränkter Pluralismus: Postkommunistische autoritäre Systeme", in Osteuropa, 7, 2006, 65-77.
* [11] For a detailed discussion, Dmitrii Furman, Postsovetskii politicheskii rezhim Kazakhstana (Moscow 2004).
* [12] On this topic see Gerhard Simon, "Der Wandel autoritärer Systeme. Postkommunistische Volksbewegungen für Demokratie", in Osteuropa, 7, 2006, 79-93.
* [13] The foreign-policy direction of the CIS governments depends on whether or not their political power at home is being put to the test. As long as autarchy is stable and the danger emanating from the opposition minimal, the presidents may take a "pro-Western" stance. In periods of crisis, though, every regime turns to Russia and the CIS. The most striking example of this tendency was the political turnaround of Uzbekistan's Islam Karimov following events in Andizhan in May 2005.

The Europe beyond Europe
Outer Borders, Inner Limits
Berlin (2007)
Page 245 - 264


Lev Gudkow

The crisis in the Russian system
Negative mobilisation and collective cynicism

In 2005, there was still consensus in Russia that the Putin regime was sitting firmly in the saddle. After a long period of social upheaval and unsuccessful, aborted reforms, the forces on the right – the "liberals" and "pro-westerners" – were seen to have failed. The debate about the future of Russia revolved solely around the issue of whether the authoritarian regime under Putin was striving to modernize the country, or whether its goal was to secure power in the manner of a traditionalist despotism. Some people argued that the new regime was exploiting the support of the population and the deeply insecure, demoralized elite in order to initiate the institutional reforms that were essential to the process of modernization. Putin was thus described in heroic terms, as the great statesman who would go down in history as the man who led his country back onto the right path. Others assumed that the new leader would underpin his power with the revenues from energy exports, and secure his control with preventive repressions and the arbitrary abuse of his administrative powers.

However, nobody considered it possible that the Soviet system would continue to disintegrate, and that Russia could degenerate into a corrupt police state with an ineffective administrative structure, a stagnant economy, a society descending into poverty, and a collapsed health system, with no leading figures in the sciences, education, or research, and with the country becoming increasingly isolated as a result.

Today, the crisis in the Putin regime, which had already become obvious following the catastrophe in Beslan, forces us to examine the cultural and human resources of the present socio-political order in Russia.[1] The helplessness and incompetence of state authorities is discussed not only by those online newspapers that remain uncensored, but also in the press that is loyal to the regime. The willingness to act among the political elite has been steadily decreasing since the summer of 2005. The planned pension reforms and the restructuring of the administrative organs led to a drop in popularity figures, quite apart from the Khodorkovsky case, which had a highly negative impact on the economic and moral climate in the country.[2] To this has been added a whole series of further errors. The foreign policy pursued by Moscow has suffered serious setbacks in Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. In terms of domestic policy, the attempt to annul benefits for pensioners, invalids, and war veterans and to replace them with direct monetary payments failed completely and unexpectedly in the wake of mass protests. The compensation payments, which were announced so unexpectedly, can be regarded as a sign of increasing tension and as a further loss of a sense of reality, in fact, as an indication of a panic attack among the leaders of state. They did everything possible to soothe the simmering anger among the population, which was directed against the ongoing decline in the health system, the continuous increases in subsidiary housing costs, or the cancellation of privileges for students, who now no longer retain the right to defer their military service until after they have completed their course of study.

The aggressive tone adopted by some of the high-ranking Kremlin officials, such as Vladislav Surkov, Dmitry Medvedev, and Igor Shuvalov, who since mid-2005 and for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, have again spoken openly of public enemies and traitors, of a "fifth column" and subversive elements also indicates a sense of panic. They referred to the Yukos case as a "lesson", and prophesied the disintegration of Russia if the elite and society did not stand resolutely behind the President. Every reform – and equally, every rejection of reform – is justified by the same argument: Destabilization looms, and enemy forces are at work. Currently, these forces are the West and Islam; in the future, they will come from China. The outdated ideological arsenal of negative consolidation is being summoned up in order to justify the strengthening of the axes of power. A systematic, negative mobilization of this nature, which invokes hatred of "the oligarchs", the United States, and NATO, as well as Georgia and Ukraine, testifies to the degree of instability of the current system of power, the crisis of legitimacy which will become apparent at the latest when voters next go to the polls.

This crisis in the regime demands a new analytical approach. It was still possible to understand the takeover of power by Putin and the "strengthening of the axes of power" with which he imitated an authoritarian leadership style within the conceptual framework of transformation research: In order to explain the transition from a totalitarian regime to a democratic order, a model could be applied that was based on a systematic transformation through liberalization and de-nationalization as well as on the model of an "authoritarian transformation". Putin's populism and the cult of the leader still complied with this theory. However, the crisis within the regime, which has become particularly obvious in the light of the change of course in Ukraine and to a certain extent in Georgia, demands other means of explanation, or at least a change in the focus of research.

A decisive difference which cannot be explained by standard transformation research is that this crisis is not the result of a specific transformation strategy or policy of reform. Just like the crisis during the final years of the Soviet Union, it can to a far greater extent be traced back to a dysfunction in the entire regime, which has problems securing its continued existence.[3] In other words: The state organs are attempting to solve their own problems or the problems of society and in so doing are creating new problems that have already become systematic and can no longer be solved by them. These systematic problems are first and foremost caused by the fact that the regime is attempting to adapt institutions inherited from the Soviet period to the new reality, instead of pushing ahead with a general reform of the post-Soviet state, even though the dysfunctionality and loss of control are obvious. For this reason, the ruling elite is suffering from schizophrenia. It realizes that "it is impossible to keep everything as it is". At the same time, however, it is not in the slightest interested in "changing anything". As a result, the debate surrounding the future of the regime has shifted to focus on the issue of how the transfer of power from the Putin administration to the administration of his successor should be engineered, or whether such a transfer should be made at all. Fundamental issues relating to the system are discussed as though they were dependent on the individuals who represent the current or future power.
Negative mobilization
Sixteen years of public opinion research have shown that since the beginning of the 1990s, social tensions in Russia have been steadily on the increase. At the same time, the level of trust in the state is falling continuously. This is reflected, for example, in socio-psychological indicators. An ever-increasing number of people are suffering from stress, depression, and exhaustion, or from anxieties of all kinds.[4] It was possible to prove this for the first time in 1994, although to a significantly lower degree than today. A first peak was reached during the election campaign of Boris Yeltsin prior to the presidential elections in 1996. Following a campaign of several months for the incumbent president that autumn, more people than ever before expressed their dissatisfaction with the political leadership of the country. A slight relaxation was recorded from February 1997 onwards. Then came the mass hysteria of the spring and autumn of 1999, the preparations for the Second Chechen War, and the bomb attacks on Moscow apartment blocks. Currently, the most recent negative impact on the public mood was recorded by the seismograph in the wake of the hostage-taking in the Moscow musical theatre Nord-Ost in October 2002. The public reactions to these events have several specific elements in common. Some – although not all – of these phases of collective tension followed as a result of negative mobilization. Negative mobilization refers to a dissemination of diffuse aggression and images of the enemy, together with a growth in anxiety about the future and the loss of values. In such a situation, the need becomes stronger for the security of the collective. The mechanisms involved in integration of this nature are negative simply because positive concepts and motivations for action are completely absent. An appreciation of the individual, or their potential, their ability to become part of a group and to develop as a result, is either not present at all or is even rejected out of hand. Instead, with negative mobilization, the danger of the destruction of the collective is perceived as being so great that the collective identity is actually destroyed. A mobilization of this nature destroys all hope that people can achieve goals together; it destroys any faith in a better future and in the attainability of ideals. Values that were previously considered to be binding are then suddenly regarded as being banalities, the meaningless rhetoric of demagogues, and empty chatter.

The overall lack of orientation and helplessness, the frustrations and aggression typical for crisis situations of this type, only become apparent, however, when public anger is given a structure in the form of symbolic roles and is then targeted at symbolic objects. Dissatisfaction, anger, and indignation must therefore be directed at specific persons or groups who are made to blame for the situation. A demonization of this nature prevents members of society from realizing the specific relationship between state and society in the post-totalitarian constellation. They lose the moral standpoint from which a critical reflection of the basic ideological principles and concept of humanity would be possible, and which in the history of Russia has time and again led to outbreaks of violence and self-destruction. The overall Russian reality – politics, society, and culture – is regarded as being irrelevant, and as a random or consciously planned deviation from what should "really" be. This concept of "what is real" is usually compiled from wild and unreflected fragments gleaned from the ideology of socialism, the paternalistic state, and the planned economy.

The social elite is transferring the specific institutional continuity that it considers a "weakness" of democracy – the dependence of the courts and of parliament on the executive – as well as of civil society, to a process-oriented template for interpretation. It thinks in transitional categories and thus assumes that the policy of transformation is a targeted one. As a result, it also identifies specific protagonists who are to blame for its failure. These are either specific individuals or diffuse social forces that are anthropomorphized: "the West", "America", "the terrorists", "the oligarchs", "the democrats", "the reformers" – that is to say, "the others".

The personified perception of social reality enables the average population and the elite – both of which can be ascribed the socio-psychological characteristics of a majority – to provide a causal explanation for events. A reality initially regarded as being completely irrational is thus given a clear and comprehensive meaning. Those who identify the enemy and demand that it be destroyed are seen as giving meaning to the situation.[5]

As a result, negative mobilization in no way triggers a social protest movement. A mobilization of that type has a more or less rigid organization, in which a group of activists announces a programme; defines symbols, specific goals, and methods; and identifies the opponents and allies of the movement. The supporters and sympathizers of the movement follow the activists. By contrast, negative mobilization is highly diffuse, its social base is elastic, its political principles difficult to define. Negative mobilization is not the result of conscious political activity or rational manipulation, but the mechanisms that trigger it can to a certain degree be set in motion by propaganda. Negative mobilization is, however, a "spontaneous" mass reaction. Many people who are in a particular social context appear to suddenly adopt similar attitudes quite independently of each other, to interpret the social reality in the same way and, accordingly, to behave in a similar manner.

In contrast to "positive" mobilization, such as for a successful election campaign of a political party, negative mobilization runs from top to bottom. Concepts, attitudes, anxieties, or moods among lower levels of society and fringe groups are adopted or consciously utilized by some people in the middle and upper levels. When they are utilized consciously, then declarations are issued that the voice of the people should not be ignored, and that their views are now an objective social fact. Attitudes of this nature make their way up the social ladder. At some point, they become incorporated into politics, the media, and, finally, into educational establishments.[6]

The dynamic of negative mobilization does not just depend on the extent of the pent-up dissatisfaction. A decisive factor is whether this dissatisfaction crystallizes itself in the shape of pre-formed ideological stereotypes. Opinion surveys may provide a clear indication that without crystallization patterns of this type, resentment, anger, anxiety, and mistrust of the rulers remain below the surface. They are only rarely taken up by the media. When the media does take notice of them, then it neutralizes the critical potential of this mood – even when a broader swathe of society shares such emotions.

When a high level of social dissatisfaction crosses with practised preconceptions, the stereotypes become generally recognized ways of explaining reality. It is characteristic of Russia's situation that mobilization which uses stereotypes has always been directed against that section of the government, presidential administration, or elite which stood for a programme of liberal reforms. It first affected Mikhail Gorbachev and the "young reformers" surrounding Egor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais. Then Boris Yeltsin himself was in the firing line, followed by the "oligarchs" – Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky in particular – and finally, all the right-wingers and democrats. To the same degree that part of the ruling elite is discredited, negative mobilization, which draws on stereotypes, is designed to confer legitimacy onto the conservative social institutions – the army, the secret services, the police, and the educational system – together with the politicians who represent them. Part of the population then really does believe that they embody national values and symbols.

In this way, with a mobilization of this nature, negative emotions become a surrogate for political programmes. The particular feature of negative mobilization is, however, that these surrogates, which are adopted by a large number of people, include targeted discreditation and abuse directed against a specific person or group. Both the generators and the recipients of such surrogates are fully aware of this. This is therefore by no means an erroneous interpretation of the social reality that can be traced back to primitive patterns of perception. To a far greater extent, the demonstrative simplification that consciously distorts reality is intended. In general, both active and passive participants in the negative mobilization are also fully aware of this.[7] The social consensus, the shared language of society, is based precisely on the principle that such simplifications are accepted. Since they require a consensus, they are also presented as "the pure truth", which is not veiled by higher motives.

Only a few people in Russia welcomed the "Orange Revolution" in Ukraine. The perception of events was not coloured by envy or nostalgic memories of 1991. Many more people expressed mistrust and rejection in opinion surveys. Most, however, reacted with the apathy of people who have been schooled to believe that they in any case have no influence on politics.[8] The scepticism of most people in Russia in contrast to the enthusiastic mass protest against the Ukrainian nomenclature, which was given even more impetus by the failure of the attempts at intervention by Moscow, is not only connected with the fact that the "little brother" had dealt a blow to the imperial pride.

There was also a certain amount of that darker petulance at work with which a cynical old man who has failed to achieve anything in life looks down on the romantic fervour of youth. The Moscow journalists were happy to spread denunciatory rumours put about by the political technocrats in the Kremlin, who claimed that the Ukrainian democrats had been bought by the United States, and that the masses were being manipulated. It was all simply a question of political demagoguery; events were being masterminded by the Ukrainian oligarchs with their clan interests and were a conspiracy against Russia. The public behaved as though they believed all of this. This widespread inability to understand other people and their enthusiasm and feelings of elation in particular, is of key importance to the anthropology of the post-totalitarian, post-Soviet population. It is a constituent element of the Russian national identity. The reason is not, of course, that people living in post-totalitarian Russia are essentially stupid, nor that they have failed to develop an ability to understand the feelings of others. It is far more the case that the inability to empathize is linked to the tendency to assume that other people, whether they are friend or foe, are compelled by the lowest motives. This also includes a willingness to believe the most ridiculous rumours when they are based on the fact that human wickedness forms the "rational" basis for all forms of human interaction. Most people select a model of explaining social action which assumes that all traditional notions and restrictions have vanished. In this way, the economic model of unlimited rationality is extended beyond the economic sphere, and it is assumed that no voluntary political or social commitment can be possible without an element of self-interest, and that even in the family, ethical issues are based on cool-headed calculation. This is also why Russian politicians, political technocrats, and political scientists are so obsessed with geopolitics: "We" – Russia – are just as "democratic", "civilized", "modern" as the others; we also have national "interests" that we pursue, and there is nothing unusual about that, since politics functions according to the principle of striving for hegemony, balancing power, and exploiting advantages. All other philosophical approaches are regarded as being hypocritical attempts at sugaring over malicious intentions with attractive phrases.

The images of the enemy so important for negative mobilization draw on archaic fears and ideological phobias that have been passed down from earlier eras. More precisely: They take the patterns of these fears and phobias as their structural basis. The anti-Semitism of today, which is generally passive, is used as a paradigm for other xenophobic and racist stereotypes. Negative mobilization incorporates set pieces from the national constructs established during the second half of the nineteenth century. In a bizarre way, they are combined with the templates used by Soviet propaganda, which initially stoked class hatred and aggression towards the "inner enemy", and which were later directed against the west. Today, elements of Russian attitudes as a major power and an imperial culture – the Black Hundreds, the national-religious revival, the decadent Silver Age, Marxism – merge to form a conspiratorial mass with elements of the closed, Soviet mobilizing society with its isolationism, arrogance, resentment, sensitivity, fear of threat from outside and within, passivity, and black-and-white thinking – Russia against the rest of the world, and in particular, against the wealthy west.

There appears to be a moral boundary in place which prohibits any public mention of those fragments of ideological sources that serve a conservative or restorative function. The role of the cynic who oversteps this boundary has been adopted by a small group of prominent politicians: Vladimir Zhirinovsky, his epigones Dmitry Rogozin and Aleksei Mitrofanov, and other agents provocateurs. In actual fact, this boundary does not exist at all. Demagoguery, lies, and provocation are among the standard rhetorical methods used in Russian political culture. The president makes use of them in just the same way as a mediocre talk-show host. The phenomenon is so widespread that it is no longer evaluated by society in terms of ethical, religious, or aesthetic principles.

This pent-up anger among the population is not in itself sufficient to trigger negative mobilization, however. The apathetic mass simply passively adapts to events. The "storehouse" for these quarried fragments is not the organs of power, but the representatives of the institutions that specialize in social reproduction: teachers, specialists in the field of technology, and journalists.

Negative mobilization is triggered by subaltern provincial bureaucrats and groups that have suffered a loss of access to the system of redistribution as a result of the collapse of Communism and the break-up of the Soviet Union, such as the ministerial bureaucracy, the army, the secret services, and the military. They have no access to power, but they harbour desires to attain it. They address a subconscious feeling of chronic dissatisfaction which the people themselves are unable to activate and articulate, but which can be used as a tool in the conflict between rival elite groups, above all against those who have come to power with a programme of modernization. As a result, it is the bureaucracy, burdened as it is with resentment, which is the real source of the collective Russian hatred of foreigners, that is far more dangerous than any group of marginalized skinheads.

Negative mobilization begins when a conviction becomes widespread that society is in the throes of a crisis, and that a point has been reached where things simply can't go on as they are. This does not by definition happen as a result of a worsening of the individual financial situation, or of political crises. Of far greater importance for negative mobilization is the social crisis, a lack of orientation affecting everyone, a persistent sense of pessimism and defeatism, the loss of all prospects for the future and any hope for a better life. In a situation like this, the normal level of scepticism towards politicians and institutions becomes chronic distrust, and dissatisfaction escalates into a sense of hopelessness.

When everyone talks of a crisis, it means that those people have now also become affected who had not earlier been consumed by this feeling of panic. It is typical for a situation in which the perception of the crisis, together with images of the enemy that explain the crisis, becomes a social convention, and that specific crisis phenomena and the naming of the enemy are not apparently engineered by any particular person. Things which were previously represented by a specific group, the media, or by a politician have now "suddenly" become common property and can no longer be traced back to any one source. Each individual in the mobilized mass believes that their perception of the crisis springs from their own personal assessment of the situation, and that the analysis of the causes is the product of their own reflection. Once the origins of the perception of the crisis have become blurred, stereotypes are accepted without question, becoming self-evident and "objective". This is precisely what is happening in Russia. Interests and ideas can no longer be attributed to a specific social or political group, and the views and positions of all social groups have become diffuse and unfocused.

A decisive element in this way of perceiving a crisis is that people feel constantly restricted, believing that their lives depend on circumstances that are beyond their control. This feeling of helplessness dominates everyday life to the same degree as their perception of key political events – from the reforms initiated by Gaidar through to the politics of the Putin administration. Two-thirds of those surveyed by the Levada Centre stated time and again that they did not believe in a better future.[9]

It can be concluded in the light of this chronic lack of self-confidence that social values have become diffuse, and that they have become shaken and disintegrated – which nota bene is not the same as a differentiation of values. Different value concepts are perceived as being increasingly incompatible. This also leads to the dissemination of a sense of helplessness. An increasing number of people believe that they would be unable to assert their rights and interests legally and via the official channels without having to accept the need for the superhuman sacrifices that human rights activists and promoters of a civil society demand of all citizens. There is no trace of "here I stand and am unable to act differently". It is far more the reverse: Here I stand. Tell me what to do now. Value concepts are becoming blurred, and ideas about what is permissible, tolerable, or acceptable are becoming increasingly unclear. This condition, in which ethics and morals become amorphous and fluid, is underpinned by a loss of a sense of solidarity. Instead of solidarity being applied as a benchmark, the model of the "ego society" becomes more valid.
Collective cynicism
When Russian sociologists discovered the first indications of negative mobilization, they interpreted it as being a one-off reaction by the public to certain events, or as a specific mechanism of collective identity formation. It appeared that these sporadic waves, such as the ebb and flow of anti-Americanism, blind faith, and deep mistrust of "the leaders", vanished just as quickly as they had appeared, leaving no trace in the collective consciousness. In time, however, it became evident that these waves had indeed taken their toll: The value system in Russian society is eroding. The symptoms are on the one hand increasingly widespread cynicism, together with periodical outbursts of aggression, lack of empathy, indifference, and the loss of the capacity to make certain value judgements. On the other, more and more groups are being established that make dogma out of their ideas and aggressively try to make their mark on society. This does not mean that society during the Soviet era was morally better or more humane. However, cynicism then was veiled by a binding and declarative canon of values and ideological self-descriptions. The semi-official "ethic" was imbued with particularistic norms for social regulation, such as loyalty, honesty, and reliability. To this was added a stock of traditional patterns of behaviour, conventions, and customs that was not rationally systematized and defined the boundaries of decent and appropriate behaviour.

Since the population reacted to the totalitarian repression and all-encompassing social control, to vertical dependence, the spy system, and the climate of denunciation, with a specific, complex method of adaptation – double thinking – they declined to consider whether or not an action was morally justifiable. In an atmosphere of organized violence, there is no space for the ethical classification and rationalization of individual or collective behaviour. After the Great Terror had passed, and when the preventive repression against individual groups or sections of society had come to an end, the great level of fear began to subside. What remains is a low level of fear; the fear of minor career setbacks, a loss of income, and fear of one's superiors. It is particularly widespread among the servile parts of the bureaucratic machine, and among those social groups that are dependent on state power.

The groups most severely affected by the change in values are those that are responsible for social reproduction. They are followed by the young, socially secure, productive groups, for whom the potential for innovation is being reduced or crippled. This is reflected indirectly in the fact that today – in stark contrast to the Perestroika years – aggressive attitudes and ideas are spreading among the young and most active groups, and that within these groups hatred of foreigners and nationalism are becoming more popular. Their open support of Putin, who personifies the friend-or-foe concept, is an indication that this deterioration in values is increasingly prevalent among these groups. Finally, the "middle class", in the broadest sense of the term, is also affected; the "normal people" whose attitudes and actions are in line with the specified norms and regulations. It is never the "centre" of society that defines what is good, noble, and beautiful. Most people either adopt the norms and standards set by institutions that specialize in creating them – the church, the education system, the cultural arena – or follow an intellectual elite. For this reason, the fact that ethics and morals are becoming amorphous and fluid may indicate a crisis in these institutions. When the concept of an absolute truth vanishes, and a readiness becomes established in its place to be content with something that is regarded less moral, or even amoral, this could be classified as being "a lack of moral clarity".[10] However, this term is too general and says nothing about the causes of the diffusion or the social mechanisms that produce this cynical behaviour.

The dissemination throughout society of a social, cultural, philosophical, or aesthetic cynicism is nothing new. The phenomenon is sufficiently known in the historical context and has occurred time and again. A "fine" cynicism regularly appears after periods of large-scale social upheaval. It indicates the unbridgeable gap between aspirations and the reality of existence and brings to light the dark side of the new values by ridiculing the transcendental nature of the ideal – while validating it in the process:

It is no coincidence that modern England has become the home of black humour. Cynicism was always the reverse side of Liberalism, its shadow, its other face, which was not recognized officially, but which was inseparably joined to it.[11]
By contrast, vulgar cynicism, which derides everything "high" or "principled", is the dubious privilege of those who have failed, of epigones who are excluded from society and culture. This cynicism has nothing to do with relativism. Relativism alludes to the fact that all values are culturally and socially determined. Vulgar cynicism, however, maintains that there is no value in anything that lends human existence significance beyond that of the individual. Acclimatization, adjustment, and adaptation to an institutionalized system of suppression and unrestricted administrative abuse of power leads to a life that is "set at a level of baseness" (Saltykov-Shchedrin). The conditio humana is devalued, and a general adaptation takes place to an order which is based on the general assumption that individuals are not destined to achieve higher aims, and that it is precisely the mediocre individuals in society who establish social standards. At the top of the social pyramid in such a society is the type of person of whom others say: "Of course he's the son of a bitch. But he's one of us".[12]

For this reason, figures from the second or third layer down – members of the security organs or imitational traditionalists – may temporarily enjoy great support among the population as a result of negative mobilization. After all, it is the function of these individuals to oust those potential leadership figures from power who promote a programme of modernization that contradicts the faceless and routine cynicism of the ruling elite.

As a result, the Russian democrats were unable to survive the enemy rhetoric and nationalistic demagoguery: When assessed in terms of their true intentions, instead of their declarations, they are just as cynical and etatist as the provincial nationalists and KGB patriots. When the Second Chechen War began, or when they were obliged to take a stance on the expansion of the EU to include eastern Europe, it became evident that the democrats, just like Putin and his supporters, were more concerned with re-establishing Russia's major power status. The only difference between them is that the democrats regard the market and democracy as being adequate means which can be used in order to achieve this.

Essentially, it was only a matter of time before the democrats capitulated and abandoned their principles; they lacked strong arguments against the cynicism of the Soviet epigones and against geopolitical demagoguery. When society is imbued with rhetorical mobilization, the power of the state is far stronger than the democratic organizations. It is better organized and has more effective means to protect itself against threats from extremists – at least, this is what most people believe in a post-totalitarian society that has once more become characterized by repression and militarization.

When power and society appear to become blurred after convulsions of this nature, this is a logical consequence, and yet also only an interim phase. It can only be followed by a police state in which power of any kind crumbles away, and in which the omnipresent incompetence of the state is veiled by a show of posturing political decisiveness.



* [1] The large number of victims and the chaotic storming of the school in Beslan stand for the failure of Putin's Chechen policy overall. Beslan revealed the extent of the cowardliness and incompetence at the Kremlin, which sticks its head in the sand and refrains from taking responsibility, while at the same time shamelessly attempting to utilize the horrific tragedy for its own tiny political gain. The events in Beslan were used to justify the direct election of governors, the shuffling of posts in the ministerial bureaucracy, and alterations to the electoral system. The ideological prettification of the centralization of power failed, however, despite massive propaganda and the state control of the media. Obshchestvennoe mnenie, 2004. Yezhegodnik. Levada Centre (Moscow 2004), 116.
* [2] Boris Dolgin aptly commented that the state power had deliberately already made it a rhetorical question as to whether or not Yukos, the owner of the company, or its employees were legally in the right. In this way, they exposed themselves. Not only the judicial system and the concept of the legal state have been discredited, but also the state power itself, which quite openly exerted pressure on the court. It can be assumed that the prosecutors and organizers of this trial will in the foreseeable future themselves be sitting in the dock; ref. Boris Dolgin, Eshche nichevo ne konchilos', www.polit.ru/analytics/2005/04/15/yukos.html.
* [3] This obviously does not mean that it could not be substituted by a completely different regime.
* [4] Obshchestvennoe mnenie, 2004. Ezhegodnik. Levada Centre (Moscow 2004), 8, 9, 21, 23 (diagrams 2.1, 2.2, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8).
* [5] One example is that the widescale support which Putin enjoyed after taking power corresponded with a negative reaction to the reforms by Egor Gaidar, whose policies had more substance than everything else which was attempted by other governments since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
* [6] During the crisis in 1998, the large-scale dissatisfaction among the lower sections of society broke through to the middle classes, even though the warning cries rang out in the name of the "poor", rather than of the middle classes.
* [7] This is indicated by the fact that phrases such as "Russia for the Russians" are met with widespread support in public opinion surveys when they are slightly toned down; in other words, when a policy of this nature should be pursued "within sensible limits".
* [8] For a more detailed analysis, see Boris Dubin, "Rossiia i sosedi. Problemy vzaimoponimania", in Vestnik obshchestvennovo mnenia, 1, 2005, 32-33.
* [9] In December 2004, the figure was 68 percent, in March 2005, 66 percent.
* [10] The term "lack of morality" was coined by Natan Sharansky: Natan Sharansky, Ron Dermer, The Case for Democracy. The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror (New York 2004).
* [11] Wolfgang Lange, "'Elemantarnye chastitsy' Uel'beka i Menippova satira", in Innostrannaia literatura, 2, 2005, 240.
* [12] This quote is attributed to Franklin Roosevelt, apparently with reference to the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza.

The Europe beyond Europe
Outer Borders, Inner Limits
Berlin (2007)
Page 265 - 296


Klaus Bachmann

Reason’s Cunning
Poland, Populism and Involuntary Modernisation

Ever since 1989, western European commentators, political scientists, and journalists have had a problem with the political landscape in Poland – a difficulty they share with those Poles who try to transfer western European categories to their country. These categories do not seem to be appropriate. Those calling themselves leftwing are, on closer inspection, only in certain respects on the left, whereas those who would like to appear as rightwing and conservative are often radical, or indeed revolutionary; liberals turn out to be economic liberals with a elitist understanding of democracy who borrow from nationalist and authoritarian thought. The Democratic Left Alliance (Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej), Poland's post-communist social democrats, was decidedly liberal in comparison to the Social Democratic Party of Germany or the French and Spanish Socialist parties. Poland's right wing called itself conservative, but has espoused at times almost social-revolutionary concepts, including a change of elites and radical proposals of reform.

A look at the political parties in the European Parliament completes this confusion: The "liberal" Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska) joined the parliamentary group of the European People's Party; the "left-liberal" representatives of the Freedom Union (Unia Wolnosci; since 2005 the Democratic Party) sit with the European liberals; the radical Self-Defence (Samoobrona) and the Catholic-nationalist League of Polish Families (Liga Polskich Rodzin) belong to no parliamentary group. Only in the case of the social democrats are things in their proper place: They are part of the socialist parliamentary group. The largest party in the current government, Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc, or PiS), sits with the representatives of the Union for Europe of the Nations, which are dominated by opponents of the EU.

Even the Euro-sceptic British Conservatives are still a part of the European People's Party. In contrast, the leaders of PiS, President Lech Kaczynski and his brother Jaroslaw, have repeatedly stressed that they do not want the party to be understood as a Euro-sceptic party. This is despite the fact that the party, and therefore also the present government, has refused to set a date for joining the third phase of the Economic and Monetary Union, pronounced the EU constitution dead in the water, and voted for the draft of a new EU basic treaty only after an extremely hard struggle. They see themselves as rigorously anti-communist, have ordered the opening of the archives of the Polish secret services, and are pursuing a radical overhaul of the ruling elite. However, they won the 2005 elections by luring voters away from the social democrats, who had been weakened by corruption affairs and inner-party divisions, with the slogan "a social, and not a liberal, Poland". Following the elections, commentators, politicians, and academics in Germany were perplexed: What kind of party is this? It describes itself as conservative, but espouses an almost social-revolutionary programmeme; it is, on the one hand, clerical and national, even nationalist, but on the other hand, appeals to a social conscience.

"National-conservative, nationalist, anti-liberal, social-national, and national-populist", murmured the European press after the elections. No one really knew how to pigeonhole Law and Justice. One also had problems with the other parties in the coalition government: Self-Defence can just as well be categorized as right or leftwing populists, nationalists, statists, or socialists. The League of Polish Families is somewhat easier to deal with: conservative Catholicism, authoritarianism, and nationalism go hand in hand here – all attributes of a slightly archaic right like that which existed in western Europe before the Second World War or in the 1950s.[1]

The problems that arise when one tries to apply classical political categories such as "leftwing", "rightwing", "liberal", or "conservative" in Poland are often put down to transformation with the argument that communism meant a completely different political experience and thus a different kind of social change.[2] However, this education was not so different. Despite the necessity of applying for a visa and limitations on travel, the censor and the planned economy, there were trends that found their way to eastern Europe. For pop culture, jeans, the musical tastes of young people, but also for fashions in architecture and certain ideals and values, the Iron Curtain was extremely porous. The origins of the problem are not to be found in the period of state socialism, but rather in the developments that took place even earlier.
Historical differences
The categories used in western Europe to describe party systems are heavily influenced by the theories of the political scientist Stein Rokkan, who argued that the social and economic conflicts of the past were so to speak entrenched in the western European party systems until the 1960s.[3] These systems, says Rokkann, were formed by fundamental tendencies emerging from the social and political upheavals of the centuries before. Rokkan mentions the French Revolution, which saw a conflict between the centralizing secular state and the claims of the transnational church hierarchy of the Vatican; the Reformation, which witnessed a conflict between transnational Catholicism and national Protestantism; the Industrial Revolution, which brought about the division of capital and labour; and finally the antagonism of town and country, or centre and periphery, which has existed since the Middle Ages. These divisions can be used for most western European countries, but it becomes problematic when one tries to apply them to central eastern and eastern Europe – and by no means simply due to the relatively short period of communist rule.

The conflict between the Vatican's claims to power and the nationalizing centralist state that sought to set up a national clerical hierarchy never played a significant role because Poland as a state did not experience the period of absolutism. A similar pretension to the nationalization of the transnational ecclesiastical structure only existed with regards to the Orthodox Church (and was implemented through the Union of Brest in 1596). This was, however, not important for the development of a Polish nation-state. Following the partitions of Poland, the fact that the Papal States as the centre of the dominant religion were outside the national territory proved not to be a barrier to nation building, as it was in western Europe, but rather a contributing factor. This was because this centre remained beyond the reach of the partitioning powers. Poland's Catholic Church remained in a certain sense Polish because its centre of power lay outside the territories subjected to Germanification, Russification, and Austrian influence. A line of conflict, as in France or England, between the claims of the nation state and the church hierarchy did not develop. Moreover, the conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism did not affect nation-building because it barely affected the nation-building elites. In Poland, which was predominantly agricultural and had little industry, even the antagonisms between capital and labour were very mild in comparison to those in the highly industrialised countries of western Europe. When industrialization was forced through under Stalinism, the terror and one-party rule that went with it prevented development of this conflict. The potential claims of the working class were not directed against a class of capitalists, but rather against the state. Therefore, during the post-Stalinist period, antagonisms similar to those in western Europe broke out into open conflicts, but they took place between the working class, on the one hand, and the state and party, on the other.

The only dividing line from Rokkan's model that was present in Poland to at least the same extent as in western Europe was that between the centre and the periphery. During the partitions, this line of conflict ran between the centres of the partitioning powers and the Polish periphery. This was the basis of the dynamism of the Polish national movement. Following independence, this conflict took place between the town and the country. Under communism, this antagonism had been frozen in place inasmuch as the centre was able to balance competing interests, while industrialization and post-war migration allowed a large part of the rural population to enjoy the benefits of urbanization. In the 1980s, the state tried to prevent these potential tensions from boiling over. Subsidies kept the price paid for agricultural products in the countryside high, while pushing down consumer prices in towns. This strategy of avoiding conflict slowly brought ruin to the state budget and contributed to the pressure on the government in favour of the reforms that ultimately led to the peaceful transfer of power to the opposition at the 1989 Round Table.

The transfer of power in 1989 took place, above all, among the urban elites. Both before and after 1989, power was in the hands of relatively well-educated, urban leaders. The peaceful transfer of power and the ensuing reforms allayed the conflict between supporters and opponents of the communist ideology, but exacerbated the conflict between town and country because the economic reforms of the 1990s ended the balancing measures. The introduction of real lending interest rates (above the level of inflation) affected above all the peasants whose production was dependent on advance financing, which led to a form of expropriation of peasant holdings carried out by the banks. These are the origins of Self-Defence, which was founded in the early 1990s by peasants who were heavily in debt and wanted to establish a counterweight against the banks and promote state intervention. The transfer of power of 1989 and the ensuing economic reforms benefited the town most of all. They made commodities such as education, knowledge of foreign languages, access to mobility and modern communication, and contacts with abroad, which were at most available in the towns, scarce in the countryside, while foodstuffs, which during the communist period had been in short supply for the urban population, became abundant.
Shortcomings of representation
Right from the beginning, an astonishingly high per centage of the Polish population did not feel itself to be represented by the new system after 1989. Despite the enormous mobilization through the government and opposition, in 1989 forty per cent of those entitled to vote did not go to the ballot box. Voter apathy increased in the years thereafter, such that in many elections only a minority of those eligible to vote did so. The highest level of mobilization was reached during the highly personalized presidential elections, which were characterized by the parties as "final battles between good and evil". Significantly fewer inhabitants of rural areas took part in the elections than did those living in towns. The one exception was the local elections – traditionally a greater part of the rural population took part than did those in the towns.[4]
Challenges of the change in values
In the 1960s, western Europe experienced a violent change in values, which was characterized by generational conflict, clashes with the police, and demands for radical reform of the universities. The cause for this explosion was, in western as in eastern Europe, a revolt by the post-war generation against the values of those who had lived through the Second World War, and the tremendous demographic pressure on the job market and state institutions created by the post-war baby boom. Behind this was a yearning for more social mobility as a result of which the protestors perceived and portrayed the ruling political system as narrow-minded, insular, cut off, elitist, and out of touch. This change in values was followed by an individualization of behaviour.[5]

Traditional middle-class values, such as the nation, family, membership of hermetic social groups, diligence, and the willingness to subordinate oneself to a higher authority, which had been preserved during and immediately after the war, were driven away by new orientations that were more suitable for economic development: creativity, critical thought, and the cult of self-realization. As a result, groups became less important. The demands of the group no longer determined the interests of an individual; instead, his or her desires, dreams, and goals were important. Women's liberation and the protection of children replaced the cohesion of the family; human rights and the right to be different in a multicultural society superseded membership in a nation, a family, or an ethnic minority. In western Europe, this led to a politicization of society, and a blossoming of civil society and participative democracy, but it also had negative consequences. The loss of social ties (to churches, trade unions, and family bonds), the higher mobility, and the removal of the division between professional and private life alienated people from one another, subjected them to greater stress, and left them with a feeling of insecurity.

In Poland, this individualization was restricted to the private sphere. The post-war factions that rebelled against the establishment in 1968 were formed from two groups: on the one hand, the younger communists who had spent the war in the underground and felt their prospects of promotion after the war had been blocked by the return of the Stalin loyalists from exile in Moscow; on the other hand, the student avant-garde of the baby-boom years, who rose against the stifling atmosphere of the late Gomulka period with the slogans of a democratic, culturally pluralistic socialism. The faction of apparatchiks was more successful in that it was able to secure the support of the majority of the working class by appealing to nationalist sentiment, by also stemming from the inter-war period, and by using anti-Zionist slogans. They pacified the student revolt with the help of the workers and the tools of the police state. As a result, many Jewish members of the party left the administration and army for emigration and were replaced by careerists from the lower echelons of the party.

In contrast to western Europe, the mixture of nationalist propaganda, emigration, and the methods of the police state led to a mass de-politicization of young people. Because the change in elites had taken place under nationalist (that is, collectivist) slogans, and was not accompanied by economic reforms, there was nothing driving political individualization in Poland. In the conditions of a planned economy, in which heavy industry formed a large part, and the rediscovery of the national by both the opposition and the regime, the process of individualization remained confined to a moderate change in values. Young people in Poland also wore jeans, listened to the Beatles, and grew their hair; they became more tolerant and introspective, and placed more value on self-realization than a high income. However, they did not, of course, found Green parties or become involved in social movements.[6]

In western Europe, the rapid change in values brought about a counter-reaction that quickly took on a political form and established its own institutions. The Green parties that sprung up in the 1980s in western Europe became the avant-garde of the change in values. Against this, populist parties like the Front National and the Vlaams Blok provided a rallying point for all those who felt that the changes had gone too fast and too far. While the first camp upheld anti-authoritarian, individualist, civil and pacifist values, the populists offered collective identities, often made use of an almost military rhetoric and acted in an authoritarian manner. Whereas the former propagated multiculturalism and openness, the latter espoused national unity and xenophobia. While the new social movements, action groups, and Green parties placed the emancipation of the individual at the centre of their activity, the populists called for the subordination of the individual to the demands of the collective. Whereas the first camp pursued women's liberation and equal rights for cultural, ethnic, and sexual minorities, which they justified with the right of every individual to be different, the populists contrasted this individualistic egotism with the group egotism of nationally and ethnically defined groups. While the former argued for a concept of citizenship based on the principles of integration and inclusiveness that could be adopted freely, the latter believed that the foundations of a community were exclusive, and could only be acquired through biological ties of kinship.

The avant-garde of the change in values and their opponents shared the tendency to contrast the common people with a hermetic political establishment, cut off from the rest of society. Within this construct, both groups presented themselves as the challengers to a ruling elite that was corrupt and removed from the (supposed) needs of the normal citizens. What the one side called grass-roots democracy, the other termed "healthy public mood". Behind both lay a fundamental distrust of representative democracy, which each in turn hoped to overcome through different means. The Greens hoped that plebiscitary elements would enable the autonomous public to exert influence. The populists wanted to help "the voice of the people" be heard. As the avant-garde of the change in values increasingly integrated itself into the political system, its claim to challenge the establishment became weaker. While the populist parties remained isolated, they made a virtue out of necessity and projected themselves as the victims of persecution, as incorruptible outsiders, and construed an unbridgeable fissure between themselves and the "parties of the system" (as in the case of Jörg Haider and the other Austrian parties). In this way, democratic competition was re-interpreted as a dichotomous struggle between the small people and their representatives (the populists) on the one hand, and the illegitimate system on the other. This construction, at the very least, shows anti-democratic tendencies.

However, through their desire to challenge the others and break their taboos, the populists made it possible to discuss topics which up to that point had been neglected, but were considered important by large segments of the population. In Austria, the FPÖ's participation in government led to the break up of cartels, and greater transparency in and control over the decision-making mechanisms of the consensus democracy. In the Netherlands, the electoral success of the Lijst Pim Fortuyn opened a discussion on the topic of immigration and the integration of immigrants. Until then, it had been downright criminalized.[7] Because populist parties, as challengers to the establishment, barely had any access to the media (particularly where the media is under the influence of the other parties, as with public broadcasters or those media belonging to political cartels), they had to break taboos in order to attract the attention of the media. Nevertheless, the taboos that they broke were always those arising from the system of values possessed by their opponents.

Because Poland did not experience the western European change in values and growth of individualism, there was also no counter-movement. Only in the early 1990s was the time right for a confrontation between the avant-garde of the change in values and their populist challengers. Economic reforms, rising affluence, opening up to the West, and finally integration into the EU, as well as a boom in foreign investment, created an impetus towards individualization, which deeply worried many people. Even today, important elements of the change in public and political values caused by the recent economic developments are still basically imported goods: private television, private radio, and popular media such as tabloid newspapers and women's magazines presenting hedonistic and individualized views were able to find a growing place in the market because they were financed by foreign investors. Changes in the media landscape, which in western Europe required decades, gushed into Poland over the space of only a few years. This imported change in values reached its highpoint at the end of the 1990s when many of the protectionist barriers were pulled down as part of the adaptation of Polish law to that of the EU. It coincided with another event, whose socio-psychological effects overshadowed even those of the transformation of 1989.[8]
Reforms as the populist moment
There is a good deal of talk about the four reforms of the government under Jerzy Buzek between 1997 and 2001. From its first day in office, the coalition of the Freedom Union and Solidarity Electoral Action (Akcja Wyborcza Solidarnosc) implemented a radical programme of reform that shook the foundations of society. The existing 49 voivodeships that had been ruled directly from Warsaw were transformed into 16 self-administrating regions. Each possesses its own parliament, which has no legislative authority and elects the executive. This was tantamount to a complete reorganization of the country. Organs of self-government also sprung up at the lowest levels of local government, which, however, possessed little power or financial means. Regional medical insurance companies assumed responsibility for health insurance from ZUS, the state agency for social insurance. New pension contributors were changed over to an equity-based system.[9] Finally, the school system was reformed through a move from a two-stage system (primary school and liceum) to one with three stages (primary school, secondary school, [gimnazjum], and then liceum).[10]

These changes intruded on the everyday life of the population, in particular in the rural areas, where structures and customs which had existed for decades, if not centuries, were torn up. For this reason, it is possible to detect an increasingly negative mood in opinion polls.[11] Distrust towards the authorities, other people, and all Poland's important neighbours grew, as did the feeling that the parties were no longer representative.

There are many indications that not the events of 1989, but rather the reform policies of the Buzek government were the "populist moment" that the literature identifies as the catalyst for a rise in populism and the success of populist parties.[12] Buzek's coalition collapsed under its internal contradictions and poor rating in the opinion polls. This triggered an "every-man-for-himself'" movement. Politicians from the coalition partners Solidarity Electoral Action and Freedom Union abandoned their parties in order to rescue their chances of re-election, and founded new parties that distanced themselves from the reform policies of the past. This was how the anti-party party of Andrzej Olechowski, the secret winner of 2000, was created. In founding the Civic Platform, Olechowski, who had belonged to both the establishment of the last years of the People's Republic and the post-1989 economic elite, formed a movement that channelled support from the presidential campaign and in this way sought to latch onto the potential frustrations of the post-Buzek period.

Another politician, however, made better use of the populist mood: While he was still the minister of justice under Buzek, Lech Kaczynski had begun a campaign against crime and corruption, two classic themes of western European populist parties. He presented himself as the strong outsider, attacking a system of corruption and sleaze. This was made all the easier in that before the departure of the Freedom Union, he had not played a leading role in Buzek's government. His attempts from above to force the public prosecutor's offices to adopt a firmer stance, his attacks on judges who passed lenient sentences, and his advocacy of the death penalty and firmer repressive measures were welcomed by the population. The ensuing debate on corruption made a once neglected topic into the most contentious issue in domestic politics, and led society to adopt a more uncompromising definition of what should be understood under corruption. As a result, the impression strengthened that the land really was ridden with corruption. The anti-corruption mood that emerged was grist to Kaczynski's mill and he was able to win the mayoral elections in Warsaw. This post was his springboard for his election as president in 2005.

Although the institutional and legal foundations for tackling corruption have improved steadily since 1989, not least due to the pressure to conform to EU law, corruption has become an increasingly important social problem during this period – at least in the eyes of society. The same is true of crime. Here, too, society's perception that there is a problem has grown, despite the fact that this concern is not confirmed by crime statistics. The population's feelings of security experienced two periods of significant growth: in the period of the transformation, that is from the communist regime's referendum of 1987 on economic reform to the Balcerowicz reform of 1990, and between 1998 and 2001, during Jerzy Buzek's term of office. During these two periods, the victimization rate (insofar as the fragmentary evidence allows one to make a conclusion) did not rise, while the crime rate went up only slightly. It did rise significantly between 1996 and 2000, but over this period the number of Poles who felt that their country was unsafe actually fell! The small rise in the crime solution rates of the police between 1999 and 2001 was followed by a rise in the number of those who felt that their country was unsafe. It is unlikely that the increasing attention the population gave crime and corruption between 1998 and 2001 was a result of an actual rise in corruption and crime. It is more likely that it was a response to the uncertainty caused by the reform policy and its consequences. This can also be seen in a comparison with the period 1990-1993. During this time, the crime rate fell slightly, while the per centage of crimes solved rose from 40 per cent to 53.1 per cent. In the same period, there was a dramatic rise in the number of those who believed that Poland was an unsafe country. It was also the time in which the largest economic upheavals took place and the Poles experienced mass unemployment for the first time.[13]

In other words, the population did not feel unsafe or believe that their country was not safe because there were more crimes and corruption than before, but rather they were interested in these topics because they felt uncertain (as a result of the Buzek reforms). This is not unique to Poland and could be observed in other countries, for example, the Netherlands.

A second trend resulting from the uncertainty of the population during the reform policy at the end of the 1990s was the search for an imagined common enemy.[14] During the period of the Buzek reforms, the prestige of almost all Poland's neighbours fell among the respondents to the opinion polls. The only exceptions were the Czechs (and nations that are geographically distant, such as the Chinese and Vietnamese, who were seen slightly more positively).[15]
Polish populism in comparison
As in western Europe, Poland's populist politicians made use of these trends. Whereas Jean-Marie Le Pen, Philip Dewinter, Pim Fortuyn, and Jörg Haider pronounced immigrants to be a threat, and promised to protect society from them, Kaczynski and his party PiS declared that the Germans, Russians and those who supposedly worked for them in Poland were enemies. In August 2004, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who was at that time still only a member of parliament, told the Polish parliament:

In Poland, there was and [...] still is a genuine front for the defence of German interests. One must also say to oneself clearly that this front [...] consists of informants of the German secret services, including those who have been handed down from the Stasi. This is a very big group of people who live from German money and act as if they were independent scholars and journalists [...].[16]
Like the common enemies imagined by western European populists, this construction is rather vague; however, in contrast, it has not yet been Europeanized. While both the Vlaams Blok and the Front National, for example, direct their xenophobic agitation foremost against immigrants from outside the EU, the definition of the aliens whom Poland's populists seek to exclude embraces direct EU neighbours like the Germans and members of its own political establishment. It is true that western European populists also seek to present members of their country's establishment as being alienated from the people. However, the populists in the West have not gone so far as to condemn them as the representatives of foreign or even hostile interests.

In contrast to some western European populists, in the case of the Kaczynski brothers the imaginary threat scenarios and the reinterpretation of their own failings as virtues are more than just propaganda and demagogy. Both brothers were active in the democratic opposition against the communist system. Both are extremely ambitious, but until the elections of 2005, they were unable to find the success they had hoped for. From the beginning of the transformation they projected themselves as outsiders fighting against the conspiracy of the elites, attacking the supposed secret society of former communists and former leftwing liberal intellectuals from Solidarnosc, but always outmaneuvered by "the system". Both brothers believe that they are the victims of the intrigues of their opponents. Both possess a hermetic view of the world rife with conspiracy theories, and both are distrustful, seeing politics as a zero-sum game, which is only about interests and in which only the strongest can impose his will.

At the same time, they are driven by a yearning to belong to the intellectual elite of their country, which has so far showed them the cold shoulder. This explains, on the one hand, the anti-intellectual demagogy of the brothers, and, on the other, the apparent paradox that both have the title of doctor, and that President Lech Kaczynski indeed taught as a university lecturer. This also explains the attempts to turn the lack of experience in foreign politics into a trump card. They argue that they have not been corrupted by foreign contacts, but rather think exclusively in "Polish categories", unlike the intellectuals and politicians who "feed from the hands of the Germans". The unsuccessful satire in the German newspaper taz in the summer of 2006[17] was, therefore, particularly painful. It tried to mock two politicians who had anyway spent their lifetime fighting against the frivolous image and condescension of those around them that had accompanied them since their success as child actors. President Lech Kaczynski and Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski are men of conviction. They believe what they say, and they act in accordance with what they believe. When they speak of a threat from Russia or Germany, it is not merely demagogy or an electoral ploy.

At the same time, Poland's populists, like their western European colleagues, are very flexible and pragmatic. Populist parties polarize, provoke, and exclude social groups, but they do so on the basis of imprecise criteria and a rudimentary programme. This allows them to perform 180-degree about-faces. Foreign policy is normally subordinated to domestic goals in that it does not try to achieve long-term objectives, but rather seeks to create a distinctive image for the party at home. An excessively provocative foreign policy will be abandoned if it does not lead to the desired domestic results.

Populist parties often deliberately refuse to draw up a homogenous ideology. They of course mostly try to present themselves as an alternative to the left and the right, as "enemies of ideology" and "anti-party parties". They take part in political discussions as the champion of a vaguely defined common good, the interests of the "little man" and an ominous, diffuse "nation", which is never properly delineated so that they can denounce any political opponent as an "enemy of the people". This all requires a proper dose of pragmatism, often more so than in the case of the established parties. Populist parties are not in a position to change the long-term interests of their country: Poland will still rely on subsidies from the EU and good relations with its neighbours no matter who is in power in Warsaw. Poland's orientation towards the West is guaranteed not only by the common market, the newly created structures of a civil society, and those citizens with contacts abroad; Vladimir Putin and his foreign policy are enough to persuade even the most convinced opponent of the EU that Poland's salvation does not lie in the East.

The developments in Poland should not be seen simply as a nationalist reaction or the anti-European revenge of people living in the past. Populist parties often act as a corrective to flaws in democracies and as a catalyst to social changes that had been obstructed. Because of this, populist parties must rely on the support of interest groups which also feel that the establishment disadvantages them. Once the populists are in power, they often introduce changes that improve these groups' access to power, state resources, the media, or opportunities to improve their social status. Society, in this way, becomes more socially mobile, old sinecures are abolished, equality of opportunity is promoted, and the party system and the bureaucracy are "aired thoroughly". In Austria, the ÖVP-FPÖ coalition brought about a weakening of the system that had removed political decisions from parliamentary and public control. In the Netherlands, the coalition of Christian Democrats and Right-Liberals with the Lijst Pim Fortuyn gave expression to the interests of estate agents and farmers, who had felt themselves to be harmed by existing environmental and agricultural policies and had felt that they had no choice but to emigrate, and created more transparency between the government and parliament.

In Poland, small cooperative banks, retailers, and all those who want to end the guild-like rules of admission to solicitors' and notaries' bodies have received new impetus. In a situation resembling that at the end of the 1960s, politicians from PiS have sounded the call to storm a bastion that has up to now sought to hold back the onslaught of those born in the early 1980s, a period that saw an unusually high birth rate. Some mention is made about the state universities, whose autonomy under communism provided a shield against intervention by the regime. However, since 1989, it has acted as a defence against reform. At the same time, the universities' complicated internal hierarchy, in which the longest serving academics must decide upon the promotion of their younger colleagues through time-consuming and bureaucratic procedures, hampers the social mobility of university lecturers. Those who were born in the fecund early 1980s are surging onto the job market and finding barriers everywhere: 40 per cent of those completing school and university end up unemployed. At the same time, the older generation already inside the state apparatus, professional associations, and universities maintain the hurdles which ensure that the professions of university lecturer, lawyer, legal advisor, notary, judge, and public prosecutor can de facto only be entered by right of inheritance. Because of the enormous difference between the countryside and the cities, these hurdles act not only as barriers between the young and the old, but also between the urban and rural population.

In 1987, those born to the educated classes were able to retain their professional status 59.4 times more often than the sons of peasants were able to achieve this status. Twelve years later, the figure had increased to 115 times more often. Despite the reforms in education introduced after 1990, the divide between town and country has opened up even more. It is significant that such cleavages have not grown between the different social groups living in the cities.[18]

In the universities this has led to a situation whereby the children of relatively affluent town dwellers study at the state universities, which do not charge fees, while the rural youth try to compensate for their educational handicap by studying at private universities, which charge hefty fees. PiS and Self-Defence represent the spearhead of those members of the rural population born in the years with a high birth rate who are now coming onto the job market. Paradoxically, this is despite the fact that the parties enjoy more support in the towns than in the countryside, as the regional and local elections of 2006 show.

The question of social mobility sets Poland apart from the developments in western Europe and other central eastern European countries. It is true that populist parties have won elections from the Netherlands to Slovakia. However, only in Poland did the "populist moment" (the reforms of 1997-2001) coincide with enormous demographic pressure on the job market and institutions. This might explain why Poland has so far been the only European land in which a government coalition has come to power made up exclusively of populist parties. In the Netherlands, Italy, and Austria, populists formed coalitions with established parties. In France and Belgium, they were emphatically isolated by the other parties and forced onto the opposition bench. Nowhere did they achieve such electoral success as in Poland in 2005. The coincidence of the "populist moment" and demographic developments also explains why of all topics the "reappraisal of the secret service past" (lustracja) has become the present coalition's chosen vehicle to bring about a massive change in elites. When the protest movement of the '68ers in Germany forced through a reappraisal of the Third Reich, they undermined the legitimacy of those belonging to the war generation, whose position of power or future chances of promotion came under pressure or were lost. In the same way, lustracja serves to bring about a moral de-legitimization of the Solidarnosc generation, that is, those who are now in their forties or fifties. These people also stand in the way of those in their twenties, who do not need to fear being accused of collaboration with the communists' security services because they were children at the time. Most politicians in the coalition in Warsaw were older at that time, but so politically unimportant that the security services were not interested in them. They thus cannot be hurt by a comprehensive reappraisal of the past and the sanctions that go with it. Seen in this way, the phenomenal growth of populist attitudes in Poland is not merely a reaction to the rapid change in values brought about by EU accession and by the reforms that preceded it, but also a delayed version of the developments that took place in western Europe in the 1960s, whereby the '68ers carved out their way into the institutions and onto the job market through the de-legitimization of their parents' generation.

Consequently, in the parliament and in state administration, as well as in the regional and local councils, the doors are being opened to representatives of those social groups and classes that in the past had no chance of being represented there: fewer intellectuals, free professionals, and members of the urban population; more rural inhabitants, the unemployed, and even criminals. As a result, the parliament, government, and bureaucracy are probably becoming less effective, but in return more representative. Opinion polls show that since 2002, the percentage of those who are happy with democracy in Poland is rising once again. This increase is not dramatic, but it is noticeable and has brought the level of satisfaction back up to that which existed before 1997.

One cannot fail to notice that this trend does not sit well with the dominant voices in the Polish and German media, which criticize the government and its record on democracy. In contrast to these, an increasing number of Poles do not see the present government in Warsaw as an accident or a misunderstanding of democracy. This divergence between public and published opinion may stem from the main conflict taking place around the coalition government in Warsaw between centre and periphery, between an educated urban population that is more individualistically oriented and a less well-educated rural population that thinks more collectively. In this conflict, the editors of the (predominantly urban) media are consciously or unconsciously on one side of the barricade, and are therefore no longer neutral observers as in a normal argument between political parties.
The paradoxes of populism
In contrast to anti-democratic parties, which propagate the abolition of democracy and the creation of a dictatorship, populist parties seek to minimize the constitutionally democratic elements (representation, the balance of interests, and the search for consensus) in favour of elements of direct democracy (plebiscites, the resolution of conflicting interests through open struggle). As a result, they are caught in a net of contradictions and paradoxes. They attack the consensus of established democrats, but in doing so make democracy more stable and better able to integrate. They place themselves at the head of the protest movement, channel it, and prevent it from becoming radically opposed to the system. They are normally led by experienced politicians, who nevertheless portray themselves as outsiders and outcasts. Populist parties fight modernization and bring together those who have lost out through modernization, but encourage – not least through their strategy of polarization – the consolidation of their opponents and in this way the very process of modernization, which they seek to hinder. Similarly, the paradox of PiS and its coalition partners is that they combine modernization in practice with an anti-modern, reactionary rhetoric. They want to increase the number of people in work, but want to keep women inside the home. They conduct propaganda against the EU, but need its subsidies. They tear down the barriers for young lawyers, but in Poland this is of more benefit for young women than men because female graduates outnumber their male counterparts. However, the populists in power cannot expect thanks from the voters: Once all the taboos have been broken and the hurdles to promotion have been removed, the voters feel that they are better represented by the established parties. The trust in state institutions rises, and "those at the top" now suddenly seem to be able to solve the problems of the citizens. As a result, the most important reasons to vote for populists disappear. Indeed, the western European experience shows that after only a short period in government, the Dutch LPF and the Austrian FPÖ were punished by their voters at the ballot box. In the Polish elections of 2005, PiS, Self-Defence, and the League of Polish Families achieved a resounding majority in parliament. In the meantime, PiS has fallen behind Civic Platform in the opinion polls, and the two smaller coalition partners could have large problems getting into parliament again at all. In the local elections of 2006, the coalition partners lost about one million votes to Civic Platform and the left.

Trust in the state institution has risen, and, according to opinion polls, the number of those who feel that the parties in parliament represent them has gone up. Populist parties are Janus-faced – they agitate against a modernization to which they themselves contribute, and attack democracies whose ability to integrate they promote. Poland is no exception here. The populist moment and its consequences for the party system in Poland are entirely comparable to the developments in western Europe. It is true that the programme with which the populists hope to score points is more materialist, collectivist, and agrarian, but this is connected with the historical development of the country. Whereas western European populists promise to defend the achievements of the welfare state, access to civil rights and certain, mainly middle-class moral concepts against "foreigners", the Polish populists declare they will protect the population from the sale of its land. The peculiar electoral programmes, which from a western European point of view appear "un-European" and exotic, above all through the dominance of agrarian-populist issues, and the fact that these subjects can also lead to electoral success in the cities, are a product of Poland's development in a direction that deviates from Stein Rokkan's model. The demographic pressure, which is behind the present drive towards a change in elites, is a result of the baby boom of the period of martial law. It goes hand in hand with the consequences of the "populist moment" of the reform years 1997 to 2001. In addition, a counter-reaction against the rapid change in values after 1990 encouraged populist attitudes in Poland significantly. The last two elements correspond to the developments in western Europe, just delayed by about 30 years due to conditions under communism.



* [1] Klaus Bachmann, "Populistische Parteien und Bewegungen in Osteuropa", in Frank Decker (ed.), Populismus. Gefahr für die Demokratie oder nützliches Korrektiv? (Wiesbaden 2006), pp. 216-232. On the worldview of the League of Polish Families, see Ulrich Schmid, "Eine glückliche Familie. Die Giertychs und ihre Ideologie", in Manfred Sapper, et al. (eds.), Quo vadis, Polonia? Kritik der polnischen Vernunft [= Osteuropa, 11-12/2006] (Berlin 2006), 69-80.
* [2] Timm Beichelt, Michael Minkenberg, "Rechtsradikalismus in Transformationsgesellschaften. Entstehungsbedingungen und Erklärungsmodell", in Osteuropa, 3/2002, 247-248.
* [3] Stein Rokkan, Staat, Nation und Demokratie in Europa. Die Theorie Stein Rokkans aus seinen gesammelten Werken, Peter Flora (ed.) (Frankfurt am Main 2000).
* [4] Raciborski, Wybory, 112.
* [5] Ulrich Beck, Elisabeth Gernsheim (eds.), Riskante Freiheiten. Individualisierung in modernen Gesellschaften (Frankfurt am Main 1994). 307-315; Martin Diewald, Soziale Beziehungen. Verlust oder Liberalisierung. Soziale Unterstützung in informellen Netzwerken (Berlin 1991); Ulrich Beck, Risikogesellschaft. Der Weg in eine andere Moderne (Frankfurt am Main 1986).
* [6] On 1968, see Jerzy Eisler, Polski rok 1968 (Warsaw 2006). For the anti-Zionist campaign, see Dariusz Stola, Kampania antysyjonistyczna w Polsce 1967-1968 (Warsaw 2000).
* [7] Dick Pels, De geest van Pim. Het gedachtegoed van een politieke dandy. (Amsterdam 2003).
* [8] On populism and the media see, Gianpietro Mazzoleni, Julianne Stewart, Bruce Horsfield (eds.) The Media and Neopopulism. A Contemporary Comparative Analysis (Westport 2003).
* [9] For more on this see Reinhold Vetter, "Der Globalisierung kaum gewachsen. Polens Sozialsystem auf dem Prüfstand", in Sapper et al., Quo vadis, Polonia?, 133-152.
* [10] Lena Kolarska-Bobinska, Druga fala polskich reform (Warsaw 1999).
* [11] Opinion polls showed that the reforms were overwhelmingly viewed negatively. See Centrum Badan Opinii Spolecznej: Cztery polskie reformy. Komunikat z badan, January 2001.
* [12] The concept "populist moment" is derived from Lawrence Goodwin. See Lawrence Goodwin, Democratic Promise. The Populist Moment in America. (New York 1996). Cf. Frank Decker, Der neue Rechtspopulismus. (Opladen 2004), 21-28.
* [13] The fact that the feeling of being threatened had very little to do with the actual security situation can be seen in the fact that the feeling of a foreign threat rose dramatically 1998-1999, that is at a time Poland was about to join NATO. Michal Skrzeszewski, "Polska a swiat", in Krzysztof Zagorski, Michal Strzeszewski, Nowa rzeczywistosc. Oceny i opinie 1989-1999. CBOS, Dialog (Warsaw 2000), 203.
* [14] See Peter Oliver Loew, "Feinde, überall Feinde. Psychogramm eines Problems in Polen", in Sapper et al., Quo vadis, Polonia?, 33-51.
* [15] Anna Grudniewicz, Michal Skrzeszewski, "Polska a swiat", in Zagorski and Skrzeszewski, Polska, Europa, swiat, 88-89.
* [16] Minutes of the 82nd session of the 4th Sejm, 25 August 2004. www.sejm.gov.pl.
* [17] "Polens neue Kartoffel", in taz, 26 June 2006.
* [18] Henryk Domanski, Hierarchie i bariery spoleczne w latach 90-tych (Warsaw 2000), 24. On the divide between town and country, see the interview with the statistician and sociologist Wieslaw Lagodzinski, "Polska wies wciaz daleko od szosy", in Gazeta Wyborcza, 15 November 2006. According to Lagodzinski half of all the village schools were closed down between 1989 and 2006. The number of students has increased five times, whereas the number of students coming from the countryside has only doubled. See also Klaus Bachmann, Polska kaczka w europejskim stawie. Polskie szanse i wyzwania po przystapieniu do UE (Warsawa 2006), 55-78.